Artist: Barry Clinton
Title: Untitled
Medium: Oil on Canvas 48" x 70" inches
Date: 1978
Barry Clinton’s ‘Untitled’ is a stunning example of realism in 1970’s American painting. This striking portrait is a stylistic reaction to the contemporaneous taste for abstraction, pop and conceptual art, returning to classical realism with updated modern subjects. Showing off his technical skill and unforgettable mastery of the human body, Clinton offers a tender image of an unknown sitter in a quiet moment of undress, his solitary body bathed in soft light. Clinton’s ability to create weight and volume, articulating musculature with subtle shadows and a simple earthy palette, is matched by a beautiful inner life captured in the unique posture and individualized details. This disquieting image of a man in the private act of undressing offers no context for his actions, rendering it as erotically charged as it is somber and melancholic. With his bare torso cast in shadow, the spotlight hovers above his dropping jeans, his white underpants almost glowing as the unsettling central focus of the composition.
Clinton’s realistic style engages with the traditions of the Spanish Old Master Diego Velazquez, in a portrait format that so greatly influenced nineteenth-century realist painters including Edouard Manet in France and Thomas Eakins in the US. Typically reserved for royalty or martyrs, Clinton employs this mode to elevate the mundane daily life of an unknown man with a timeless sense of dignity.
This is the first major painting by Clinton to be sold at auction, offering an unparalleled opportunity for a collection.