The painting had a prominent role in the groundbreaking sitcom “Good Times.”
The unexpected star lot of last week’s Christie’s 20th century auction was The Sugar Shack, the most famous painting by Ernie Barnes. The 1976 work went for $15.3 million, or an astonishing 76 times its high estimate of $200,000.
A celebration of Black joy, the painting depicts an enthusiastic crowd of men and women with elongated limbs, seemingly carried away by the music as they dance the night away.
“The painting transmits rhythm, so the experience is re-created in the person viewing it,” Barnes, who died in 2009, said in an interview with the Soul Museum. “To show that African Americans utilize rhythm as a way of resolving physical tension.”
Ahead of opening the lot, auctioneer Adrien Meyer warned that there were “22 telephones” poised to enter the fray, but the winning bidder, Bill Perkins, made a special trip to New York from Houston to ensure he could bid in person.
Perkins won the day after a grueling 10 minutes of bidding—“it started and it just went nuts,” he told the New York Times, adding that when a rival bidder, identified by the Value as Dane Jensen of Los Angeles art advisory Gurr Johns, warned that he wouldn’t stop bidding, “I replied, ‘Then I’m going to make you pay.’”
Prior to the auction, the painting was in a private collection, having only had three owners since leaving the artist’s studio.
Christie’s cites a relatively sparse exhibition history, starting at a group show on Black art and cinema at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 2004. It also appeared in shows of the artist’s work at the North Carolina Museum of History in 2018, and in Los Angeles at the California African American Museum (CAAM) in 2019 and UTA Artist Space in 2020.
The painting was last on view in New York in October, in a solo show devoted to Barnes at Andrew Kreps Gallery.
At CAAM, the work was identified as a loan from Jeannie and Jim Epstein, a Los Angeles attorney and his wife, according to Culture Type.
Here are three things that you might not know about the painting, the winning of which Perkins called “a childhood dream come true” on Instagram.
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