A Critical Perspective on the Art of Ernie Barnes
by art critic Frank Getlein

In the 1520's, the golden balance of Italian Renaissance art was suddenly broken and discarded. Artist after artist began inventing strange new worlds of their own, worlds of heightened colors, of sharpened, sometimes distorted perspectives, elongated human bodies, extravagant human gestures and expressions, all bathed in dramatic contrasts of light and shadow. This radically new way of painting and sculpture was derived from the manner of Raphael and Michelangelo and was called "Mannerism."

From its beginning in Rome, Mannerism spread north to the Italian cities of the plain, the Alpine foothills and Venice. It crossed the Alps with Italian artists, then brought to France to decorate the new royal palace at Fontainebleau and rapidly appeared in most parts of Northern Europe. By the end of the century the unusual features of Mannerism were softened into the Baroque art and architecture that were to dominate the 17th century all over Europe and Latin America. As time passed, Mannerism survived as a bad memory. In art history, it became a mere transition between Renaissance heavenly harmonies and Baroque worldly glory.

In the early 20th century, art historians took a fresh look at Mannerism and found it had virtues of its own worth anyone's attention. Indeed, its former infelicities of exaggerated proportion and gesture, heightened contrast and the rest, were now found to be good things for reasons ranging from their sheer virtuosity to their revelations of hidden aspects of both humanity and art.

In this, of course, rediscovered Mannerism had things in common with the new art of the 20th century. Cubism, too, seemed to distort and exaggerate and rearrange the everyday world. Likewise Surrealism, with its impossible juxtapositions, revealed hidden aspects of both humanity and art.

Beyond the art connections between the 20th century and the 16th, there were plenty of points of contact between the ideological, political, even military situations of the two centuries. In the 16th century, Europe was split between established Roman Catholicism and newly born Protestantism. This led to the Wars of Religion which culminated in the Thirty Years War.

In the 20th century the split is between Communism and Capitalist-Democracy. It, too, has led to years of wars all over the globe.

The 16th Century saw the discovery, conquest and exploitation of new worlds in the Americas and Asia. Our own new worlds are in heavens above and the process of discovery proceeds apace.

In both times, all these things unsettled old certainties, disturbed peace of mind and were reflected both in 16th century Mannerism and in 20th century Cubism and Surrealism, in Abstract Expressionism and much of what has succeeded that movement.

Now, as our unsettled century nears its end, a Los Angeles based artist, Ernie Barnes, has applied Mannerist principles and techniques to subjects of contemporary, late 20th century life, and thus created Neo-Mannerism.

His two principal subjects are those he has himself experienced most intimately: athletics, both scholastic and professional, and the small-town ethnic life of the American South, into which he was born. Both those themes are presented in Barnes' painting at moments of high intensity, which is itself one more link between his Neo-Mannerism and the Mannerism of the 16th century Europeans.

Those two principal themes of Barnes, athletics and ethnic life in the American South, are united in an early masterpiece, "High Aspirations." A solitary black youth practices basketball shots against a desolate background of flat, barren land, a stark farmhouse, a homemade basketball stanchion with a basket converted from one made for fruit or vegetables, with the bottom knocked out. The pale yellow sky, with its hints of pale green, emphasizes the desolation of the setting. In that setting -- in a sense out of it -- the young solitary player leaps in the air and stretches his arm well beyond the anatomical possibilities to "slam-dunk" the ball into the basket.

The gangling youth isn't gangling at all in this moment of "high aspiration." But he has become as stretched out as any El Greco saint reaching for God. And even within that anatomical elongation, the arm dropping that ball is fantastically exaggerated. Hanging down, it would reach below the calf, could scratch the ankle with only the slightest stretch. But of course, it isn't hanging down. It is reaching up and it is in that gesture that, for the aspiring youth -- and for the onlooker, us -- it assumes that prodigious length.

The picture has all the characteristics of Mannerism: fantastically elongated length of body and limbs; the serpentine line of the body as it reaches for the basket; the purity of the austere colors of the whole scene; and the use of space for purpose of isolation and hence intensification of the figure and its effort and feeling.

The development of everything present in that painting, including the high regard for sports as a way out of poverty for ethnic youths may be seen in a series of paintings for the XXIII Olympiad, held in Los Angeles in 1984.

Peter V. Ueberroth, President of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, appointed Ernie Barnes Official Artist. He could hardly have found a better artist for the job and the resulting suite of paintings is about the finest, most effective and moving tribute to the Olympics since the Greeks stopped painting their athletes in red or black figures on black or red grounds.

His image of the rhythmic gymnast, practicing a then new Olympic event and one slightly controversial. Barnes had no trouble with it at all. "The Gymnast" is seen in mid-leap, like a ballerina. (Actually the moment captured does recall the legendary dancer Nijinsky's explanation of his art, "at the top of the leap, you pause.") Although the young girl performer is obviously doing a solo, she is also doing a pas-de-deux of sorts, with the long yellow ribbon as her partner. The curves and reverse curves of the ribbon repeat and elaborate upon the curves of the girl's body and her movements.

The girl is a Neo-Mannerist figure of spare limbs cast out in all directions yet as unified as if she were a single block of marble. The floating ribbons seem extensions of the fluidity and grace of her movements.

Another image in the series is, appropriately, a kind of coda. "The Neighborhood Games" used the scene of the Olympics, the Coliseum, as background, topped by the Olympic Flame and a sky full of festive balloons. In the foreground is a tall framed house buntinged and bannered for the "Olympic Neighborhood Games," featuring "Basketball, Racing, Cards, Jumping" and, as a late entry, "Cooking." In the left foreground, a volleyball game is played. At the right, officials confer, a lone basketballer sinks one in a crude rim on a backboard nailed to a tree and, on the porch, the hostess receives a late entry in the late entry event, a monumental meringue.

In classical theater or painting, especially in the Mannerist period, that last scene would be the "Travesty," in which peasants or clowns - sometimes monkeys, dogs or cats - try to imitate the high goings-on of their social betters, such as serenading, dueling, speechifying, dancing, whatever. Not here.

In a way that last scene, "The Neighborhood Games," makes the ultimate point of the whole Olympic Revival, which will mark its centennial in 1996. Here the great events are being celebrated as sincerely as, perhaps more so than, they are by the people in the hundred dollar seats. There is genuine grace and talent in the neighborhood sports we see, the volleyball and basketball.

That "The Neighborhood Games" painting is also a link between the two general fields that most of the art of Ernie Barnes has concerned itself with: the sports pictures on the one hand and, on the other, scenes of everyday life, known in art history as Genre painting.

Mannerism, like the Renaissance before it and Baroque after it, was strictly an aristocratic-monarchical art, perfectly attuned to the tastes and indeed the inner convictions of the ruling classes in most of Europe. In the elegance and grace of the figures, they saw themselves as they "really" were. In the dramatic atmosphere they saw their own high deeds as their various acts of betrayal and assault "really" were.

What Ernie Barnes has done is to bring the contrasting elements of these deeply contrasting forms of art together in paintings of everyday life in which the everyday people found their partake of the grace and the personal heroism that is indeed a part of many humble lives but that, in traditional art, has been reserved for the monarchies and aristocracies of various kinds that have used art to reinforce their dominant positions.

By boldly applying the essentially aristocratic Neo-Mannerist elegance and elaboration of figure and gesture to Genre subjects, Barnes once again -- as in "The Neighborhood Games" - broke down ancient barriers of class and station to reveal the natural aristocratic elegance of ordinary people in certain circumstances. Two examples:

"Sugar Shack" take its title from the name of a black jazz joint that reaches back in ancestry to the origins of jazz itself in the Storeyville joints of New Orleans. The joint is jumping, but note that the joint itself, the room, the gallery, the stairway, are all solidly architectural, conventional horizontals and verticals, straight lines all, including the few diagonals provided by the staircase. It is the people who are jumping to all that jazz, not really the joint itself. Their jumping included the most extravagant gestures and postures, poses and movements. Curve answers curve from the saxophone to the belly of the sax player, from the hand motions of the guitar player to the empty hands of the "air guitarist" below him. The people are all angles and curves, a forest of curvilinear diagonals against the somber planes of the setting, of strong lighting in details against the relative darkness of the overall scene, all adding up to a highly sophisticated composition.

It adds up as well to a stunning demonstration of the fusion of Neo-Mannerism and Genre painting that Barnes alone has perfected and practices. The dances of ordinary people have been a standard subject of Genre painting since it was invented by Breughel. The perfectly controlled lighting and the elaborate poses of the elongated figures are classic Mannerism. "Sugar Shack" effortlessly combines the two heritages in Neo-Mannerist Genre painting. Any Mannerist painter would be proud of the succession of figures in the main, central group of dancers, but the whole is infused with the innocent exuberance of Breughel and his fellow Flemings.

If "Sugar Shack" can be thought of as Saturday Night, "The Gospel Truth" is Sunday morning. And it is not the cold gray dawn of the morning after, but in a sense, the continuation of Saturday night fever by other means. The celebrants in the "Sugar Shack" were moved out of themselves into a higher, more intense experience of life by the spirit of jazz, aided and abetted, no doubt, by beer and booze. Those in the church the next morning are similarly moved out of themselves into a higher mode of perception, but now by the Word of God and its reception in their individual and communal souls.

There are more that 50 people in the picture and only eight of them make up a formal group, the choir in the upper left. There are occasional pairings, but most of the rest of the congregation is acting - or reacting - as individuals. A woman in a blue dress in the upper right stands, arms raised, head thrown back, clearly moved by the Spirit of the Gospel. Similarly moved are the women in white next to her and the parishioners with the saxophone, the tambourine and the guitar. Although the sources of music are thus scattered, with only the pianist seemingly relating to his eight singers, the music, like the movements of the congregation, is obviously orchestrated by the spirit.

The skillful crowd management, the dramatic contrast of light and dark and of colors within both, the exaggerated postures, the strong sense of the spirit choreographing all movement, all that would be right at home among Tintoretto's scenes from scripture on the ceiling of the School of San Rocco in Venice.

Seated and still, in somber black, the minister reads the Gospel of the title and provides the quiet center for the human storm that responds to the words and music. The whole scene reminds the White churchgoer that Christianity started out as a religion of joy. For American black people, it still is, and no one has recorded that so tellingly as Ernie Barnes.

Interestingly enough, the most important position in both these elaborate, pulsing figure groups, "The Sugar Shack" and "The Gospel Truth," is occupied by a woman in white downstage center. In the nightclub, she is dancing, holding her skirt up almost to her crotch, quite unconsciously, just caught up in the drive of the music. There is clearly nothing between her full breasts and the thin fabric of her gown.

That same, white-clad full female figure in the church picture, is seen from the back, going away from us. Arms are curved upward, lending a purposeful point to her arching fingers. Light and dark play across the broad expanse of her hips, thighs and buttocks. Her swelling dark calves and slender ankles are accented by the light on the floor behind them. Both figures are wearing high heels, which, especially in motion, underline the general sensuality of the female form.

The sensitivity to the female body is a typical Mannerist theme, wholly different from the nude as ideal form in the Renaissance and from the nude of appendage to worldly glory in the Baroque. For the Mannerists, the feminine form was endlessly attractive in and for itself. It is by no means dominant in the art of Ernie Barnes, but when it does appear -- as in "Sugar Shack" and "The Gospel Truth" - it does so in full awareness of the sensual attraction that radiates from Mannerist nudes.

In two paintings dominated by the female form, that form is used for two purposes usually pursed separately in Mannerist and in most other art: erotic appeal and satiric point. You can't laugh and lust at the same time in response to the same stimulus. That's theory. In practice, we know that the combination was never a problem for Mae West, for example, nor for other comic actresses.

In "Holding Court," the lady in red, facing us, is indeed holding court in the sense of dominating the conversation to the eager admiration of her two friends leaning forward from the two footstools.

There is an engaging balance among the three figures. All of them are fashionably skinny. The talker learns forward. Yellow Dress arches her back so as to thrust out her front; White Dress, the other way around. From the standpoint of status, it is appropriate that the talker has the seat with a back, the sofa, while her listeners get only the backless stools, underscoring the instant hierarchy of who has the news and who wants it. There is a lively play or arms and legs with the hands and fingers pure Baroque themselves. The more you look at these three belles dames sans mercy, the more they remind you of the Weird Sisters in "Macbeth."

They are, of course, more elegant, but there is the same strong suggestion of three women intent on working some effect. There is not a relaxed muscle or nerve ending in the trio, which is true of any Mannerist figure not asleep or dead. In their attenuation, their exaggeration of gesture and expression, as in that high concentration, they are quintessentially Mannerist figures.

Similarly elegantly slim are the eight parading models of "The Fashion Show," as well as the two in reserve right in front of us with the owners, the photographer and the man we take to be the designer in the white turtleneck.

One of the nice things about Ernie Barnes' large figure groups is that there is never any mass: each of the people present has been carefully cast, scripted and directed, so to speak, by Barnes to create an ensemble that is both a coherent group and a collection of individuals. It's like a crowd scene by Federico Fellini without the grotesques. And if there is a Mannerist filmmaker in the Italy that created Mannerism in the first place, it is assuredly Fellini.

Out of that well-differentiated crowd arise the models, like an octet of Venuses from the waves. Here Barnes has almost miraculously bridged the enormous cultural and time gap between the 16th century and our own. These figures, elongated into poses of conventional sensuality, necks stretched beneath precisely angled heads and frozen faces, would be just as at home in the sculptural courtyard of Fontainebleau Palace as they are in their specially 20th century exhibition. It was in the building and decoration of Fontainebleau that Francesco Primiticcio impressed Mannerism upon the emerging soul of French art.

Someone once called the sculpture of the early 19th century Neo-Classicist, Antonio Canova, an "erotic Frigidare." That is precisely the quality Barnes has perceived and recreated in "The Fashion Show."

By far the most ambitious single painting project Ernie Barnes has undertaken to date was commissioned by Sylvester Stallone, the movie maker who created and played Rocky Balboa, the Philadelphia son of immigrants who rose through the murky ranks of professional boxing to attain the ultimate prize in prize-fighting, the world heavyweight championship.

The commission was important to Barnes' growth because, for the first time, it brought him into the use of a myth as subject. There are mythic aspects to all sports and Barnes has contributed to the celebration and explication of them, as in his series for XXIII Olympiad. But "Rocky" was different. It was a myth, that is a story, with a beginning, middle and end, a goal pursued against obstacles and conflict of the most elemental kind.

Such a story represents the dreams, ambitions and actual achievements of a sizeable part of the population and in a way the beliefs of the entire population about the virtues of the country, and therefore becomes a myth.

It is not too much to say that the mural, "The Metamorphosis of Rocky" constitutes the Sistine Ceiling for Ernie Barnes. This is not to compare him as an artist to Michelangelo, although there are clearly points in common; nor is it to compare the "Rocky" movies with the first nine chapters of the Book of Genesis, although both are myths that speak to millions of their aspirations and origins. It is simply to point out that Michelangelo made his major achievements in painting in the figure groups of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling and the wall of the Last Judgment, both subjects vital parts of the Christian myth, or story; and Barnes has made his, to date, in painting the figure groups of the contemporary American myth of Rocky Balboa.

It is interesting, too, that Michelangelo was, if not the father exactly, certainly the chief inspiration for the style of painting, print making, sculpture and even architecture that became known as Mannerism. The name derived from art "in the manner of, " a la maniera de, and the artist whose manner was most imitated was Michelangelo, particularly in the Sistine Chapel, in the late carved Pietas, and, architecturally, in the Medici Chapel and the Laurentian Library in Florence.

Within the mural, Barnes tells the story in five panels, one for each of the four "Rocky" movies and a centerpiece, "The Apotheosis of Rocky," which acknowledges the power of the myth the mythographer has made: A bronze statue, heroic size, on a pedestal, centers the oval picture. The statue is on the steps and landing of a classical public building complete with marble figures in the pediment and Ionic columns. Just in front of the oval golden frame of the scene, a young artist sits, sketching the statue. In front of him stands a Cub Scout, a book in his left hand, his right raised in a salute to the statue. Other boys, including a group of basketball players, and men and women, join in the admiration. The bronze Rocky, because of the low angle of view, towers about the building itself and is backed up by a white cloud against a deep blue sky. To the left of the statue's right shoulder is a triangular patch of faintly pink cloud and to the left of that, against the blue sky is a curious, nine-sided shape of white cloud that could be read as a star, thus combining in the sky of Rocky's Apotheosis the red, white and blue which figures prominently in the center oval of the four representing the four movies.

"The Apotheosis" is the only oval of the series framed in part by two classical figures in the two upper spandrels of the painting, the triangular spaces caused by placing an oval within a rectangle. The figures recall the athletes and prophets and sybils that frame the events of Genesis on the Sistine Ceiling. In this case they both represent Fame, appropriately , with her golden trumpet.

In the four other panels, the gold-draped ovals are seen against a rectangle of fabric, draped in folds, bordered top and bottom in white, against another fabric, this one gold. In each case, two gold bands are placed horizontally, as if supporting the oval picture. The same arrangement of fabric appears around the edges of the Apotheosis, below the two figures of Fame. What is suggested by all this background is the bunting decked sides of the ring itself, with the gold bands representing the gold belt that is the symbol of the world championship, the prize in prize fighting. The oval shape of the panels is, of course, that of the prototype prize fight ring, the Colosseum in Rome.

The first oval in the series nicely groups scenes drawn from the first movie, including the famous and at the time shocking sequence of Rocky practicing punching on a side of beef hanging in a packing house cold room. This, on the left, is balanced on the right by a view of Rocky on the steps of that Neo-Classic temple that will be the scene of his Apotheosis. Leading a group of youth in celebration, Rocky is posed near the place his statue will occupy and takes a very similar pose, legs apart, arms on high.

Centered between these two scenes is the "card" of the championship fight, a good place to consider the name of the hero, Rocky Balboa. There was, of course, a real Italian-American heavyweight champ named Rocky, Rocky Graziano. Presumably, Balboa, like Graziano, got his nickname from his real name, Rocco, after San Rocco, an heroic young 14th century layman who gave all his possessions to the poor and devoted his short life to taking care of the plague-stricken. San Rocco was the most decent and humane of all the Conquistadors, made friends with the Panamanian Indians and discovered - and named - the Pacific Ocean.

The reigning champ, whom Rocky must defeat, is Apollo Creed, which sounds very close to the Apostles' Creed, which Rocky and Stallone must have both memorized as Catholic children. The first name, however, is actually that of the pagan sun god of Greece and Rome, hence adding a religious overtone to the fight, one that culminates in the benign figure of God the Father presiding over the whole ensemble, casting rays of blessing upon Rocky in the ring.

The figure of Rocky himself undergoes a progression throughout the series. The superb physique remains the same -- and is kept that way by the dedicated training we see in each picture. But there is a subtle change in the psychology of Rocky. At the base of the first, embracing his fiancée, shortly to become his bride, he looks upward, face full of hope, Rocky Aspirant.

At the bottom of the second oval, beneath, once again, training exercise, now in the form of a marathon, combining running with silent preaching of the gospel of healthy living, Rocky flings his arms up and out, Rocky Triumphant, having clinched the title by winning the rematch.

At the bottom of the third - actually the fourth in the hanging, the progression having been interrupted by the Apotheosis - Rocky appears in full fight against a persistent opponent, Clubber Lang; now Rocky Agonistes.

And finally, at the bottom of the last oval in the series, derived from the final "Rocky" movie in which the American champion fights the Soviet champion, Rocky appears holding the American flag behind him, Rocky Pro Patria. That remarkable final oval looks backward and forward at the same time. Immediately above the image of Rocky with the flag is that of Rocky hoisting a long log on his bare shoulders, a pointed reference to and identification with Christ carrying the cross, the logical conclusion of the religious theme introduced at the top of the first painting, with God the Father benignly shedding His grace on Rocky.

As to the future, the painting aptly concludes the career of Rocky as Boxer and points ahead to his reincarnation as Rambo, the fearless American foe of militant Soviet Communism wherever it threaten the cause of freedom.

It is odd on the face of it that no painter until now has used his art to celebrate the art of the movie. Half the history of painting - much more before about 1850 - was devoted to the celebration of literary works, from the Bible to the Greek and Roman myths and epics to contemporary classics, most notable Ariosto's Orlando Furioso and Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, but also including works by Milton, Shakespeare, Dante and many others.

Before the Rocky sequence of paintings, there are really only two examples of series of paintings derived from movies. If we include television, there were Barnes' own paintings for a Norman Lear situation comedy largely inspired by Barnes' career; and there were the paintings of progressive human deterioration that Ivan Albright did for the movie version of Oscar Wilde's classic, The Picture of Dorian Gray.

With "The Metamorphosis of Rocky," Barnes has opened up a new field of exploration for the current revival of realism in American art. The movies - and to some extent the movies' stepchild, television - are what we in the 20th century have instead of contemporary poetry and the classics that provided so much narrative pleasure and narrative instruction in ages past. From Giotto and Duccio to Delacroix and Ingres, European art got its subject matter from the poets who created or reworked the myths of the culture. In our culture, the movies have given us our myths, that is stories universally known, remembered, seen again, perhaps, and in some way believed in.

So far, only Ernie Barnes has seen and used the immense possibilities in the movies as a source for painting. This is really why a comparison between the Barnes "Rocky" mural and the Sistine Ceiling is appropriate. Both are interpretations of universally known and widely believed in myths, stories, that is, which embody something a people or a culture sees as close to its own being, its own special way of life or way of coming to terms with life.

But the movies are rife with similar myths, waiting the attention of painters. What could a painter like Barnes - or different - do with "Citizen Kane"? "The Maltese Falcon"? "42nd St."?

Barnes has shown the way. If enough others follow, the early years of the next decade could find an art of painting in this country as truly popular as were the landscapes and Genre paintings of the 19th century, the Ash Can and American Scene paintings of the 20th.

Ernie Barnes has, in almost a quarter century as a professional artist, created a body of work that commands attention and that amply repays it both in terms of the effects, the complexities and the unities that appeal to and satisfy both intellect and emotion, and in those of a remarkable achievement in art history.

His achievement in art history is double: it operates both as re-examining and drawing new inspiration from ways of art of the past, and creating a quite new art for his own time, the last third of the 20th century and, in anticipation, the early years of the next.

With the arguable exception of the bison and antelopes on the walls of those caves, all art has been made out of earlier art. For some centuries, artist looked back to the Renaissance, but the Renaissance looked back to classical Rome, which looked back to even more classical Greece.

The inner strength of Ernie Barnes's unique combination of Mannerist and Genre painting comes from the fact that he did not consciously set out to copy either one. He devised his own Neo-Mannerism out of his own all-but-unique among artists knowledge of the experience of competitive athletics. And he painted Genre subjects not because he wanted to paint Genre pictures, but because the subjects were realities he had known all his life or was newly getting acquainted with. Like all original art, the art of Ernie Barnes has sprung from the artist's encounter with life, not from his contemplation of art.

The result of that is a direct connection between the art of Ernie Barnes and the lives of most of the people who see his art. The art works on two levels, neither one "higher" than the other, just different, in different locations within the mind. On one level we grasp the masterful artistry: the tight, superb composition, the precise elongation of the figures, the impact of the pure colors. The coming together of all these elements make the Neo-Mannerist art of Ernie Barnes. We respond to these as we do to great performances at the opera or the theater. On the other level all these things work together upon the subject matter and within us: we feel the body straining toward the tape at he end of the race; the long lift of the boy tilting the ball into his homemade basket, the roadhouse dancer arching her body toward and away from that of her partner; the Sunday celebrant of religious service being carried away by the music of the hymn, the words of the Gospel, the vision of the New Life.

All these motions, all these bodies, all these colors and shapes, become, for a moment, ourselves. Art cannot give us more.

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