Matt Snell, New York Jets

Stylized and dramatic, Ernie Barnes’ Matt Snell, New York Jets captures the untethered physicality and athleticism of an American football player. In the painting, Snell seems to defy gravity, clutching the football with his larger-than-life hands while lunging towards the edge of the canvas. His body is impossibly contorted, his gaze looking out beyond the canvas. Snell’s emboldened calf and foot push the boundaries of the painting, unconfined by the pictorial plane. He barrels toward the viewer, almost breaking out of the canvas. The long, fluid line created by the dramatic twist of Snell’s body mirrors the elongated ovular form of the football he cradles, building a sense of cohesion into the work. Highly charged with strength, energy and movement, the present lot captures the artist’s career long fascination with the body in motion.

A talented athlete and passionate artist, Barnes grew up a football prodigy in the segregated town of Durham, North Carolina. After receiving 26 scholarship offers, he attended the historically Black North Carolina College on a full sports scholarship while majoring in art. In 1960, he was drafted to play for the Baltimore Colts, and would spend six years playing in the American Football League, tempering his desire to pursue a career as an artist.

After retiring from professional football, Barnes was hungry to pursue art full-time. On the endorsement of business mogul Barron Hilton, Barnes crashed the A.F.L executive’s meeting to convince owners to make him the first official painter of a professional sports league. Though he was ignored and taunted by other owners, Sonny Werblin of the New York Jets offered him a salaried position as the team’s official painter. It was during this period that Werblin commissioned Matt Snell, New York Jets to commemorate Matthew Snell’s 1964 AFL Rookie of the Year title. Barnes credits Werblin with legitimizing his career as an artist, writing in his autobiography “It was Werblin’s concept of me as a valid artist that made this final adjustment in my self-perception” (Pads to Palette, 94).

Barnes’ oeuvre is dedicated to his lifelong fascination with depicting the human body in motion. Characterized by expressive and gestural strokes, he was driven to capture the energy and movement he felt while playing football. In his early works particularly, Barnes described wanting “to tell a real truth of what it feels like to get hit, to hit, to run, to turn, to backpedal.” The influence of his time as a football player is evident in the present lot, with the undeniable sense of dynamism and dramatization of different parts of the body. Seeking to communicate the movement he experienced on the football field, Barnes depicted Snell not with scientific acuity, but the fluidity felt while playing football. Barnes told an interviewer, “being an athlete helped me to formulate an analysis of movement… and movement is what I wanted to capture of canvas” (Barnes, quoted in “Millions Saw His Paintings on TV. In the Art World, His Work Still Went Unnoticed”).

Considering himself a neo-mannerist, Barnes indulged in a gestural, elongated style to enliven the bodies of his subjects. As a child, Barnes would accompany his mother to her job at the home of a prominent attorney. There, he studied the books of classical artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Delacroix, Caravaggio and Rubens, whose influences’ he carried into his later works. Captured by the sense of movement and contradiction in the work of great mannerists, Barnes took inspiration from the dramatized forms and bold colors while infusing his own experiences as an athlete. Once dubbed “America’s El Greco,” Barnes rich and energetic compositions give new energy to the classical style of mannerism. In Matt Snell, the legacy of Barnes’ childhood study of the mannerist masters is clear, with the subject’s elongated pose and the distortion of scale.

Beyond the world of sports, Barnes inspired a whole generation of artists with his innovative techniques. Contemporary artist Rick Lowe praised Barnes, saying “Barnes was the sole artist to introduce visual art to the overwhelming majority of Black Americans in the ‘70s… He define what art was for Black people during that time” (Rick Lowe quoted in “Millions Saw His Paintings on TV. In the Art World, His Work Still Went Unnoticed”). Carving his own path, Barnes playful canvases are a testament to his persistence and dedication to creating his own artistic language.

The present lot is not only a classically beautiful work, but a piece of history. Energetic and fluid, passionate and raw, the painting captures the essence of American Football from a rare and unreplaceable point of view. An inspiring example of Ernie Barnes’ profound ability to forge his own artistic language, Matt Snell is a work that is nearly impossible to characterize, transcending the boundaries of what it means to be a contemporary artist.