Drawing Papers 159 In the Medium of Life

159

In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney

To A.C.

In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney

Drawing Papers 159

The Drawing Center

In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney

with contributions by

Rebecca DiGiovanna Laura Hoptman Jessica Lynne

Table of Contents

8

Introduction Laura Hoptman 16

In the Medium of Drawing: A Life on Paper Rebecca DiGiovanna 40

The Profound Reach of Beauford Delaney Jessica Lynne 52

Plates 204

Checklist

Introduction Laura Hoptman

8

Beauford Delaney’s artwork does not fit comfortably into the conventional art historical teleology of American and European postwar painting. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he studied in Boston and then made his way to New York City, where he would spend the first portion of his career during a time of cultural ferment that saw an explosion of new ideas in music, in literature, and in art in neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and Harlem. In 1953, at the age of fifty-one, Delaney took a steamer to Paris, where he would spend the rest of his life. Delaney’s work changed when he left the United States. According to witnesses, it took him only two months to transition from a van Gogh inflected modernist realism to pure abstraction. Delaney’s bifurcated life and career is only one of several reasons why his work has been difficult to define. Black and gay, he also suffered from intermittent mental illness. These aspects of his identity, coupled with a life-long lack of resources, might help to explain why his work was given only limited exposure both in New York and in the galleries and salons of Paris during his lifetime, but also since his death. In fact, Delaney’s work was not the subject of a New York retrospective until 1978. Organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem, it was the only American survey exhibition in his lifetime and one he was too ill to travel to witness.

In the years following Delaney’s death in France in 1979, there have been a handful of exhibitions devoted to his work: most notably, a 2004 survey at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and more recently, a 2020 examination of the relationship between Delaney and James Baldwin at the Knoxville Museum of Art, his hometown museum and the beneficiary of a number of important bequests from his estate.

In this period of cultural change and deep uncertainty in all aspects of American life—including academic methodology—examining

Delaney’s contributions to the history of postwar American and European art seems necessary. Delaney’s stylistic nonpartisanship, his supra-national self-definition (he famously refused to call himself an expatriate because he felt he belonged in Paris in a way he never had in New York),1 seems today almost like a manifesto of contemporary artistic values. At this moment in the United States, such a stance can also be seen as a position of cultural defiance.

Happily, the American art community has begun to recognize the unique example of Delaney’s multi-layered and complex career.

In the Medium of Life is one of several museum surveys that will be presented at American museums over the next few years. The Drawing Center is honored to present this introduction to the extraordinary work of Beauford Delaney in the best way that we know how: through the lens of his work on paper.

Delaney’s work has often been defined by his complex biography—specifically, his personality (gnomic sage, bon vivant) and his coterie of notable friends that included at one time or another Georgia O’Keeffe, Countee Cullen, Henry Miller, and most significantly, James Baldwin, who met Delaney in New York when the former was a teenager.2 Baldwin and Delaney would forge a friendship that lasted a lifetime. Baldwin was a kind of muse for Delaney, who produced many portraits of his charismatic young friend. Delaney, in turn, was a cherished, almost talismanic inspiration for Baldwin, who characterized him as a kind of spiritual and artistic guru. Though substantially younger than the painter, Baldwin had a protective, almost parental presence in Delaney’s life. It was Baldwin who suggested that Delaney move to Paris and Baldwin who swooped in to save the mentally and financially floundering Delaney when he was living in a cold water flat in Montparnasse, moving him to a heated, light-filled home in the bucolic Paris suburb of Clamart, where Delaney’s practice flowered.

It was in Clamart that the artist explored the possibilities of gouache and the derring-do of edge-to-edge monochromy. Over the years, as Delaney cemented his roots in France and Baldwin ping-ponged between New York, Istanbul, and Paris, the younger writer kept

1

2

See Diane Turquety, “(In)visible Man: African American Artists and Paris (1945–1984),” originally published as “(In)visible Man, les artistes africains américains et Paris (1945–1984),” Revue de l’art, no. 189 (2015): 49–54.

The will to use biography above all else to define visual art production is called “the van Gogh effect,” a term coined by Nathalie Heinich in the essay “La Gloire de Van Gogh” (Paris: Minuit, 1991), as cited in Turquety.

9

10

watch over the older artist’s mental and physical well-being.

In the end, it was Baldwin who, with the help of Delaney’s friends in Paris, arranged for Delaney to be hospitalized at the Centre Hospitalier Sainte-Anne in Paris, where he died in 1979 at the age of seventy-seven.

The artist’s New York career, between 1929 and 1953, corresponded with that explosive cultural highpoint that has been called the Harlem Renaissance, but the connection between Delaney’s works and the arts produced during the Harlem Renaissance is complex. Although Delaney chose to live in Greenwich Village, not in Harlem, he became friendly with or knew a number of the major voices of the period including, notably, the poet Countee Cullen. Delaney also had a passion for jazz and experienced the music of many of New York’s greatest jazz musicians in clubs and on records,3 and this interest involved him in Black cultural life both uptown and downtown. Delaney’s early, academically rendered portraits of the 1930s fit comfortably in the milieu of some Harlem Renaissance artists, but by the 1940s, Delaney’s work was no longer so carefully academic, exhibiting influences of Europeans like Vincent van Gogh, Wassily Kandinsky, and Henri Matisse.4 Delaney’s cityscapes of the mid 1940s—depicting downtown New York landmarks like Washington Square Park or places he visited like the artists’ colony Yaddo have more of a link with second generation Cubists like Stuart Davis, an artist that Delaney knew and admired.5 Delaney’s move to Paris had many motivations; among them was the desire to escape the pall of American racism and the desire to be close to the art he revered and the companions he loved, like Baldwin. But there is another, less examined reason to have left New York in 1953: the paintings that he was making at the time were not in sync with the artistic moment in New York. Modernist to the hilt, Delaney’s van Gogh-inflected, quasi-Fauve portraits as well as his Cubist-inspired cityscapes were redolent of art history. It is

3

4

5

It is a notable fact of his biography that he lugged a phonograph with him when he came to New York, a precious object that, the story goes, was stolen his first night in the city. It is also documented by witnesses that jazz music always played in Delaney’s studio, so he must have found the wherewithal to replace this precious object.

Delaney reportedly experienced Matisse’s Le Bonheur de Vivre at the Barnes Foundation during a visit to Philadelphia in 1947. See Patricia Sue Canterbury, Beauford Delaney: From New York to Paris (Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Art / University of Washington Press, 2004), 21.

Delaney met and had a “long term association” with Stuart Davis during his New York years. See Canterbury, 15–17.

a beautiful irony that the moment Delaney was exposed in person and in depth to the work of his art historical heroes, he began an artistic practice that jettisoned figuration6 to concentrate on allover monochrome abstractions with expressionistic or calligraphic brushstrokes that was suddenly in step with the burgeoning French Art Informel. Delaney’s abstractions, particularly those on paper in oil, gouache, watercolor, and sometimes even ink and charcoal, can be more aptly compared to the smaller, more studio-oriented compositions of a contemporary European painter like Georges Mathieu than say, the mural-sized oil on canvases of Jackson Pollock.

His abstract language can also be fruitfully contextualized with North American artists in Paris like Norman Bluhm (who, like Delaney, turned to abstraction upon arriving in Paris, only to return to figuration upon his return to the United States) and calligraphic “writing painters”7 like Sam Francis, Mark Tobey, and the Canadian Brion Gysin. Delaney was close to Sam Francis and exhibited with him in Paris in the late 1950s. It seems that the practice of working on paper spurred Delaney’s experimentation with the word as image. He was at his most calligraphic in a series of ink on paper compositions from 1956, though later paintings sometimes exhibited a kind of looping, repetitive brushstroke.

As soon as Delaney began to experiment with abstract, painterly languages he never stopped. He did however simultaneously return to figuration, particularly portraiture, and by the middle of the 1960s he was experimenting with ways to bring the two together, either by embedding his flat, colorful likenesses into swirling, monochromatic backgrounds or inferring the figurative with a smudge of color in a work composed of abstract forms.

James Baldwin called Delaney’s change of artistic languages in late 1955 through early 1956 a “metamorphosis into freedom.”8 According to the art historian Patricia Sue Canterbury, Delaney recognized that practicing the dual languages of figuration and abstraction at the same time was a feat, but like a number of artists 6

7

8

It is reported by Patricia Sue Canterbury in the catalog that accompanies her Delaney survey at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2004, that it took a mere two months (August to November of 1953) for this stylistic transformation to occur. See Canterbury, 49.

Brion Gysin coined the term Écriture to define his calligraphic writing painting. See Laura Hoptman, “Disappearing Act: The Art of Brion Gysin,” in Brion Gysin: Dream Machine (London and New York: Merrell and New Museum, 2010), 63.

Stephen Wicks, “Art Wise: Curator Stephen Wicks,” Hunter Museum of American Art, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsAcmbO2_Fk&t=297s.

11

12

working in Paris during the 1950s, he was interested in merging the two, despite their opposition like “rich and poor, city and country, old and young, male and female.”9 Delaney’s steady devotion to drawing, whether in notebooks or on sheets of paper, might have made this transition easier. Where there is line, there is figuration.

For his entire sojourn in Paris, Delaney lived an economically precarious life, and his copious use of paper as a support can in part be ascribed to lack of resources; paper and cardboard are cheaper than canvas, a material that was often financially unobtainable during periods of Delaney’s Paris life. Nevertheless, the act of creating an image from line—drawing in its most elemental sense— held special significance for Delaney. An inveterate sketcher, he produced tens of notebooks filled with quick drawings depicting people, places, and sometimes abstract motifs. Some of them were aides-mémoire, their echoes returning in finished drawings and paintings. Others, like a series of self-portraits whose wit and economy of line might recall the practice of caricature, were executed with a directness and maybe even joy for the sake of catching a moment or a likeness.

In the Medium of Life is an attempt, in exhibition form, to present Beauford Delaney’s oeuvre within the parameters of drawing; to be precise though, just as The Drawing Center broadens the definition of the medium to include all works on paper, with the exception of prints, for this exhibition, we adhered to the category of drawing that includes pencil and pen sketches, charcoal and ink drawings, watercolors, gouaches, and selectively, paintings on cardboard and monoprints. So important were these mediums to Delaney that his artistic practice over a lifetime can remarkably be described through the works on paper he produced. We the curators have also opted to include a handful of oil on canvas works, not only to give our viewers the gift of Delaney’s exquisite colors and painterly cuisine but to help anchor chapters in the trajectory of a career that that does not unfold in a straightforward manner, but instead zig zags back and forth. To use a musical metaphor, the paintings in this drawing exhibition establish a rhythm and keep time as Delaney’s joyful, sad, and wondrous career unfolds.

9

Beauford Delaney, quoted in Canterbury, 21.

Acknowledgments This exhibition would not have been possible without the visionary support of a cohort of philanthropic collectors who have advocated for the study of Delaney and for the presence of his works on the walls of America’s most consequential art museums. The Drawing Center’s profound thanks are due to Lonti Ebers, Agnes Gund, MarieJosée and Henry R. Kravis, Alice and Tom Tisch, and above all, A.C. Hudgins, who introduced me to Delaney’s work a mere decade and a half ago, and to whom this exhibition and book are dedicated. These visionary donors, along with the generous advocate of African and African American art and close friend of The Drawing Center, Isabel Stainow Wilcox, quickly understood the urgency of this project and supported it in the blink of an eye.

The Drawing Center could not have undertaken such a scholarly project without the generous sharing of expertise and Delaney material by several sources: halley k. harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld, special advisors and representatives to the Estate of Beauford Delaney; Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York; Derek Spratley, the Court Appointed Administrator of the Estate of Beauford Delaney; and the Knoxville Museum of Art. Halley k. harrisburg is a Delaney expert in her own right, and in addition to lending us copious numbers of drawings, gouaches, and paintings on board by Delaney, she has donated her time to this project, as have her colleagues at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, including Dan Munn, Brian Chillemi, and Francesca Leszynski. Stephen Wicks, Barbara W. and Bernard E. Bernstein Curator at the Knoxville Museum of Art, is one of the most respected experts on Delaney’s oeuvre. It is due to his guidance, kind hospitality, and generosity with his extensive knowledge of Delaney’s work that we were able to identify and borrow objects from the KMA’s collection and from key private collections in Knoxville. We are grateful to Steven Matijcio, David L. Butler Executive Director at the KMA, for agreeing to lend such a substantial cache of work from the KMA collection. We also thank Clark Gillespie, Collection Manager at the KMA, for his bountiful assistance.

At The Drawing Center, we are first and foremost indebted to Assistant Curator Rebecca DiGiovanna, who is the co-curator of this exhibition. Rebecca is a graduate of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and brought to this project a deep familiarity with Delaney’s oeuvre and the scholars and supporters in Knoxville that form the Delaney community. With enormous enthusiasm coupled

13

14

with a keen eye for detail, Rebecca managed every aspect of this show, from organizing the biographical displays to choosing the wall colors. Her essay, included in this volume, carefully guides the reader through the complexities of Delaney’s career. Filled with insightful information on Delaney’s life, she is careful not to allow biography alone be the lens through which she considers the artist’s work, presenting a thoroughly researched chronological assessment of Delaney’s artistic career that puts that work at the center of the story and in context with its artistic time. Rebecca’s essay is joined by one from writer and critic Jessica Lynne. Commissioned by The Drawing Center especially for this publication, it is a beautifully written and enlightening rumination of Delaney’s subjectivity.

We are honored to publish this contribution and heartily thank this author.

A number of institutions and individuals have lent key works to the show. My personal thanks to Chiwoniso Kaitano, Executive Director of MacDowell; Sadie Greene, the Librarian of the James Baldwin Library at MacDowell; and David Macy, Resident Director.

Their incredible portrait on paper of Baldwin, made by Delaney in 1945, has been little seen outside of MacDowell, and we are thrilled to feature it in our exhibition. Many thanks also to MacDowell board member Fairfax Dorn, who connected us. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture was enormously generous, giving access to their Beauford Delaney collection. We give our heartfelt thanks to Joy L. Bivins, Director, and Tammi Lawson, Curator of Art and Artifacts. We are also thankful for our colleagues at the New York Public Library, especially Giovanna Pugliese, Manager, Permissions and Reproduction Services. We are grateful to additional lenders, located in New York, Boston, Paris, Philadelphia, Connecticut, Memphis, and Knoxville, for so generously parting with their beautiful works so that we might tell the story of Delaney on paper. They are listed elsewhere in this book, but they are no less appreciated.

A number of colleagues in the field, specialists on Delaney and the period in which he lived, have helped us in our research. They include Delaney biographers Dr. Mary Campbell and David Leeming (also lenders to the exhibition), whose research on the artist were key foundational resources. We also acknowledge Sam Yates, former Director of the Ewing Gallery, Knoxville; Jennifer Beals and Kris Bronsted, who are associated with the Betsy B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Libraries at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville; David Leopold, Creative Director, Al Hirschfeld

Foundation; the James Baldwin Estate; Chris Hodges; Roy Freeman; Katherine Brinson, Daskalopoulos Curator for Contemporary Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator, Studio Museum in Harlem.

There are many colleagues to thank at The Drawing Center, including our Deputy Director Olga Valle Tetkowski; our Development team of Rebecca Brickman and Tiffany Shi; our Registrar Sarah Fogel; and our Operations Manager & Head Preparator Aaron Zimmerman. We owe a special thanks to our Curatorial Fellow on this project, Rebecca Bonini. This book was edited and designed by our friends and colleagues Joanna Ahlberg and Peter Ahlberg. Assistant Curator of Research Isabella Kapur’s assistance with the exhibition’s interpretive texts was crucial, as always, and the communications team of Allison Underwood and Isa Riquezes have contrived a great way to tell the world about the show. Finally, our colleagues Valerie Newton and Anna Oliver have sensitively and beautifully created bespoke retail products for this show in addition to compiling a library of reference books for a curious public.

15

In the Medium of Drawing: A Life on Paper Rebecca DiGiovanna

16

The extraordinary legacy of the artist Beauford Delaney unfolds across three vastly different landscapes. His story begins in the foothills of Appalachia, where Delaney was born into the oppressive reality of the Jim Crow South. It continues north to the bustling streets of New York City, where the artist found kinship among the artists, poets, and intellectuals who defined the Harlem Renaissance.

Finally, it culminates in Paris, where Delaney sought both artistic liberation and personal refuge, only to face new forms of isolation and adversity. As a Black gay man navigating the entrenched racism and social stratification of early twentieth-century America, Delaney faced systemic barriers that compounded his personal travails. The discrimination he experienced in the segregated South, paired with the trauma of witnessing the racial violence of the 1919 Red Summer as a teenager in Knoxville, left an indelible imprint on his psyche that manifested later as paranoia, bigoted auditory hallucinations, and depressive episodes, which would ultimately overwhelm him.1 Raised in a religious household, he struggled with his sexuality throughout his life—this struggle, too, would play a part in his mental deterioration. And yet, his visual legacy is not one of despair and disenfranchisement, but of resilience and a relentless pursuit of enlightenment made manifest by a fascination with the depiction of light.

1

The 1919 race riots in Knoxville were part of a broad spectrum of racial violence known as the Red Summer, a series of race-related clashes across the United States. The Knoxville riot erupted in August after allegations that a Black man had assaulted and murdered a white woman, leading to the mobilization of a mob that attacked Black neighborhoods, homes, and businesses, including those on and around Vine Street near Delaney’s family home.

17

FIG. 1 Beauford Delaney, Paris Window, 1953

From his early years in Knoxville to his final decade in Paris, drawing remained an essential tool to bolster his internal fortitude. In his pastel portraits from the 1930s and ’40s, which convey a reverential attention to his sitters, and in his later abstractions that shimmer with a transcendent, almost spiritual radiance, Delaney used drawing as a means of externalizing and, if only briefly, quieting the mental turmoil within. During periods of darkness, when the voices would take over, the act of drawing became a form of catharsis and a way to regain agency over his own thoughts. For Delaney, drawing was a means of channeling something greater than himself; it created a metaphorical space where he could find sanctuary, clarity, and at times even joy. Though Delaney’s biography is shaped by struggles with poverty, prejudice, and critical neglect in his home country until the final year of his life, his work on paper is suffused with an irrepressible luminosity and joie de vivre—testifying to a spirit that found—in color, line, and form—reason to keep drawing.

18

FIG. 2 Beauford Delaney, The Burning Bush, 1941

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1901, Beauford Delaney was raised in a household where faith, creativity, and resilience coexisted amid the racial and economic hardships of the segregated South. His mother, Delia Delaney, was a seamstress who had been born into slavery, while his father, Reverend Samuel Delaney, was a barber and an itinerant Methodist Episcopal preacher whose ministry took the family across southern Appalachia. One of ten children, young Beauford found solace and self-expression in drawing, an early passion he shared with his younger brother Joseph. The two sketched on the backs of Sunday school cards during their father’s sermons, quietly cultivating the skills that would later define their artistic careers.2 By his mid-teens, when his family returned permanently to Knoxville, Delaney’s precocious talent caught the attention of Lloyd Branson, a prominent white Impressionist painter who had studied at the National Academy of Design in New York City and also in Paris.

With Branson’s financial support and encouragement, Delaney left for Boston in 1923 to pursue formal training, enrolling in institutions like the South Boston School of Art and the Copley Society. Delaney’s stay in Boston was transformative for the young artist. He refined his drawing skills and immersed himself in the city’s artistic and

2

David Leeming, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 12.

intellectual atmosphere. Frequent visits to the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum introduced him to the work of European masters whose innovative approaches to color and flattened pictorial perspectives would greatly influence Delaney’s own. He was particularly drawn to the color and light of Claude Monet’s landscapes and the bold, expressive forms of Henri Matisse, and was also drawn to the more academic but psychologically rich portraits of John Singer Sargent.3 These formative encounters cemented his dual artistic devotions: one to portraiture, the other to abstraction—seemingly divergent paths that Delaney would explore in parallel for the rest of his life.

In 1929, Delaney left Boston for New York, arriving just after the stock market crash that heralded the start of the Great Depression and ushered in a decade of economic crisis. He immediately encountered the city’s unforgiving realities: within hours of his arrival, his possessions—including his clothes, record player, and the drawings he brought from Boston—were stolen while he attempted to lease a room in Harlem.4 That night, sleeping on a park bench in Union Square, he was further robbed of his shoes.5 Despite this harsh initiation, Delaney was captivated by the city’s electrifying energy—its restless movement as well as the sheer diversity of lives unfolding in its streets. Harlem, in particular, was a cultural epicenter where Black artists, musicians, and writers thrived, and Delaney quickly became embedded in its creative networks. He formed close friendships with leading figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including poet Countee Cullen, the assistant editor at Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, and artists Ellis Wilson and Palmer Hayden who, along with Delaney’s brother Joseph, informally dubbed themselves “The Saints.”6 He also became acquainted with Al Hirschfeld, the celebrated caricaturist whose satiric FIG. 3 drawings of Broadway icons were Al Hirschfeld, Caricature of gaining widespread recognition [FIG. 3].

Beauford Delaney, 1941

3 4 5 6

Ibid., 29.

Ibid., 32.

Ibid., 35.

Ibid., 40.

19

Amidst the financial precarity of the Depression, Delaney supported himself through commissions, drawing portraits of society women and men as well as influential cultural figures who had, like him, traversed boundaries of race and class. He depicted blues legend W.C. Handy (whose 1944 book Unsung Americans Sung he would illustrate [FIG. 4]) as well as actress and singer Ethel Waters, whose powerful performances brought the sounds of the blues to integrated audiences [FIG. 5].

20

FIG. 4 Beauford Delaney, Illustration of Harriet Tubman in “Unsung Americans Sung,” edited by W.C. Handy

FIG. 5 Beauford Delaney, Ethel Waters, 1940

He painted Canada Lee, the former prizefighter-turned-actor whose socially conscious theater work made him a trailblazer in breaking racial barriers on stage and on screen. Perhaps most unexpectedly, Delaney formed a friendship with writer Henry Miller, whose unflinching literary explorations of sexuality helped Delaney reconcile some of his own anxieties about being a gay man in an era of rigid social norms. Miller’s 1945 chapbook, “The Amazing and Invariable Beauford Delaney,” would also help elevate Delaney’s profile within the broader artistic community. Delaney’s first one-artist exhibition in New York, held in 1930 at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, consisted entirely of works on paper [FIG. 6]. His five pastels and ten charcoal portraits underscored the centrality of drawing in his artistic practice. The same year, he was invited to participate in a show at the Whitney Studio Galleries, the predecessor to the Whitney Museum of American Art, which featured “Sunday painters” (a term used, sometimes pejoratively, to describe self-taught or uncredentialed artists, and an obvious misnomer for the art school-educated

21

FIG. 6 Announcement with checklist for Exhibit of Portrait Sketches by Beauford Delaney, 1930

Delaney). Though a relatively modest opportunity, it marked his first exhibition in a major institutional space. Shortly thereafter, Delaney accepted a job as a security guard at the gallery, taking up residence in the basement, which doubled as his studio. During this period, his approach to drawing shifted. The academic precision he had honed as a student in Boston gave way to a looser, more expressive style less bound by the conventions of academic realism. His portraits in the 1930s were not strict likenesses but instead vehicles for deeper psychological exploration—capturing

22

the essence of his sitters while reflecting aspects of his own temperament and interior world. The fluidity of his line, combined with a growing emphasis on tonal contrasts and a looser kind of mark-making, suggested an evolving sensibility—one that would foreshadow the luminous gestural abstractions that would define his later career.

Around this time, Delaney began his studies at the Art Students League, where he worked with Ashcan School artist John Sloan and Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton. He frequented the salons and exhibitions held in Charles Alston’s studio, known as “306,” which served as a gathering space for Harlem Renaissance artists and literati: regulars included painters Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, and Romare Bearden; the sculptor Augusta Savage and her student Gwendolyn Knight; novelist Richard Wright and poet, novelist, and playwright Countee Cullen. Though Delaney remained on the periphery of New York’s downtown modernist movements, he also cultivated relationships with legendary avant-gardists like Jackson Pollock (who was also a student of Thomas Hart Benton) despite his aversion to the hyper-masculine culture of the emerging Abstract Expressionist scene. More significantly, he found kinship among artists associated with influential photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, including the painter Georgia O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe, who rarely produced portraits in her seven-decade career, created five striking depictions of Delaney—an honor that underscores the profound impression Delaney made on her [FIG. 7].

In 1936, Delaney relocated to a third-story loft on Greene Street, where he eventually met a young James Baldwin who, with Delaney’s encouragement and mentorship, would become one of the best-known literary artists in postwar America.7 This meeting was the inauguration of a nearly forty-year friendship between two men who, despite their significant age difference, were kindred in many ways: both preachers’ sons, both iconoclasts, FIG. 7 both gay and Black, both determined Georgia O’Keeffe, to thrive and find parity in racist, Beauford Delaney, 1943 7

Leeming, 52, 69.

homophobic societies. Baldwin said he found in Delaney “the first living, walking proof…that a Black man could be an artist”8 and that Delaney taught him nothing less than “how to see and how to trust what I saw.”9

23

FIG. 8 Anthony Barboza, Portrait of James Baldwin in His Home, 1978

Delaney produced more than twenty drawings, paintings, and notebook sketches depicting, inspired by, or dedicated to Baldwin. Among the earliest is an expressionist drawing from 1945 8 9

James Baldwin, “Introduction” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1985), xi.

James Baldwin, interviewed by Jordan Elgrably, “The Art of Fiction No. 78,” The Paris Review, no. 91 (Spring 1984): https://www.theparisreview.org/ interviews/2994/the-art-of-fiction-no-78-james-baldwin.

24

in which a teenage Baldwin gazes outward with quiet confidence [FIG. 9]. His face is rendered in a kaleidoscope of colors, his striking features outlined with rhythmic, swirling strokes reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh. Against a pastel backdrop of pale blues, reds, and yellows, Baldwin radiates—a testament to Delaney’s reverence and tenderness for him. By 1963, Delaney’s evolution toward abstraction is unmistakable in a pastel portrait now housed in the Smithsonian.

Baldwin’s bust-length figure vibrates against a luminous expanse of mustard-yellow and orange, his visage and clothing dissolving into the surrounding space as if they are merging with the very air around him [FIG. 10]. Several years later, in Untitled (Yellow, Red, and Black Circles) (1966), painted during a visit to Istanbul with Baldwin and dedicated to him, Delaney fully embraces non-objectivity [FIG. 11]. While not precisely a portrait, the composition has anatomical attributes that suggest embryonic or phallic forms. Viewed horizontally, the forms coalesce into the suggestion of a face, the black central line forming a nose that bisects two dilated, staring eyes. When placed in dialogue with his earlier portraits, these works on paper illustrate Delaney’s fluid approach to various modes of artmaking. In his portraits of Baldwin, as in his broader oeuvre, the boundary between subject and atmosphere, between figure and formlessness, remains permeable.

FIG. 9 Beauford Delaney, James Baldwin, 1945

FIG. 10 Beauford Delaney, James Baldwin, 1963

FIG. 11 Beauford Delaney, Untitled (Yellow, Red, and Black Circles for James Baldwin, Istanbul), 1966

Throughout the 1940s and into the early 1950s, Delaney continued to make portraits but also expanded his subject matter to include still lifes, street scenes, and urban interiors reminiscent in palette to the French Fauvist tradition and in composition to the jazzy, American-style Cubism of Stuart Davis. A lover of

25

FIG. 12 Beauford Delaney, Untitled, 1946

music, Delaney was profoundly influenced by the jazz musicians he encountered in Harlem clubs like the Savoy Ballroom and Café Society, where he absorbed the improvisational brilliance of luminaries like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, and Dizzy Gillespie.

The syncopated rhythms, layered instrumentation, and frenetic energy of jazz would eventually find their way into his still lifes and interior scenes, transforming even the most mundane subjects—such as a bunch of grapes—into a visual staccato of sharp, jagged lines reverberating outward toward the paper’s edge like percussive sound waves [FIG. 12]. Two decades later, in a short artist’s statement accompanying his application to the Guggenheim Fellowship, Delaney would credit jazz’s inherent abstraction as a driving force behind his own push toward nonrepresentational painting.10 Delaney’s cityscapes from this period maintain the improvisational spirit of jazz while merging the grit of Ashcan urban realism with a second-generation Cubist approach to denaturalizing space. Perspectives collapse, forms shatter, and reality is thereby reconfigured into rhythmic compositions. While teachers like Benton

10 “Beauford Delaney–Career as Creative Artist” Application for Guggenheim Fellowship, 1966. Scm 88-33 Delaney, Beauford letters–biography, n.d., Folder 1/1. Held in the Beauford Delaney Collection, Archives and Rare Books Division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.

26

FIG. 13 Beauford Delaney, Twilight Street, 1946

and Sloan almost certainly influenced Delaney’s engagement with quotidian life and everyday objects, it was Delaney’s admiration of artists like Davis and Paul Cézanne (who stimulated a shift to a Cubist-inflected style) that defined what is called his “Greene Street” period.11 These urban landscapes feature a signature lexicon of mundane objects: fire hydrants, traffic signals, and manhole covers that float above compressed sidewalks, while lampposts cast an eerie glow over the deserted streets and shadowed tenement facades of downtown Manhattan. These cityscapes are often executed in saturated, high-key colors with impasto brushwork as thick as stucco—as in Twilight Street (1946), a painting on Masonite that has an almost sculptural presence [FIG. 13]. When the Greene Street works were shown in 1949 at Michael Freilich’s Roko Gallery, artist and critic Elaine de Kooning described them as conceived with a “violent impasto”12—a sentiment later reprised by Henry Miller in Remember to Remember, in which he describes them as “virulent, explosive… [and] mad with color.”13 11 Ann E. Gibson, “Gay and Black in Greenwich Village: Beauford Delaney’s Idylls of Integration,” in Beauford Delaney: From New York to Paris, ed. Sue Canterbury (Minneapolis: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2004), 14.

12 Elaine de Kooning, “Reviews and previews—Negro artists,” Art News, February 1949, 47.

13 “A Word from Henry Miller,” The Bulletin, Sydney, N.S.W: John Haynes and J.F. Archibald, 1880. Web. 3 March 2025, http://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-533281894.

In Twilight Street, there is an undercurrent of unease—devoid of people, its empty streets and adrift architecture conjure a sense of urban isolation and hint at underlying anxieties of the time. In the aftermath of World War II, the tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union gave rise to a tide of McCarthyism, paranoia, and intolerance that encouraged violence against marginalized communities—including Jewish, Black, and gay people. Delaney witnessed firsthand the gradual exodus of Black artists from his Greenwich Village neighborhood, a shift chronicled in the 1949 article “Twilight for Greenwich Village.” When interviewed for this article about his future plans, Delaney responded, “Nothing in particular… except to go on searching for wider horizons of freedom and more concrete ways to be without Byzantine formula.”14 Four years later, Delaney would board the SS Liberté and sail to Paris, where he hoped to find the freedom that had long eluded him in New York.

FIG. 14 Beauford Delaney, Paris, 1953

In 1953, with encouragement from James Baldwin, who wrote that it was “from the vantage point of Europe [that the American] discovers his own country,”15 Delaney joined the wave of expatriates drawn to the French metropolis—many of whom were funded by America’s GI Bill, which subsidized living expenses and paid for

14 Allan Morrison, “Twilight for Greenwich Village,” Negro Digest, January 1949, 31–32.

15 James Baldwin, “A Question of Identity” in Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), 100.

27

28

FIG. 15 Beauford Delaney, Chartres, 1954

veterans’ schooling. Among these expats were artists like Mark Tobey, Sam Francis, and Paul Jenkins, as well as literary legend Richard Wright, who was acquainted with Delaney from Charles Alston’s 306 studio. For Delaney, who was not supported by government funding, his education unfolded beyond the confines of formal instruction—on excursions to Parisian museums like L’Orangerie and the Louvre; during languid Montparnasse lunches at La Coupole; and in the salons and studios of fellow artists living on the Left Bank. Delaney loved the great cathedrals of NotreDame and Chartres, visiting them often to bask in the exquisite light filtering through their stained glass windows.16 In 1954, he lauded Chartres as “the most wonderful thing I have ever seen created by man”17 and painted Chartres, a luminous oil painting 16 Leeming, 133.

17 Stephen C. Wicks, Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2020), 22.

on paperboard in which exuberant swirls of cobalt blue, yellow, and red are enveloped by thick, banded loops stacked atop one another, their composition bordered like the leaded framework of a stained-glass window [FIG. 15]. His fascination with the spiritual power of light was not born in Paris, of course; it had deep roots in his past as a preacher’s son. In a 1955 sketchbook entry, he recollects an afternoon spent in his father’s church, where the voices of the congregation seemed to coalesce into a kaleidoscope of hues— a moment of synesthesia in which the spiritual was made visible: “Sun high summer. The brightness of Sunday morning sings with the earnest unison of deeply felt songs by the devout congregation of the Methodist Church of John Samuel Delaney of Cleveland, Tennessee. The variety of color resplendent in the audience—from the color of purple and black eggplant to deep amber and…even mother of pearl...all colors of the rainbow make the stained-glass effect in the choral reality of the splendor.”18 In the years following WWII, abstraction became a universal language of the avant-garde around the world, facilitating a transatlantic exchange between distinct yet interrelated artistic movements. Figures of the so-called New York School, like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, made commanding abstract paintings characterized by their heroic size and psychological intensity. In response, Parisian artists and theorists sought to define their own kind of postwar abstraction based on the solid foundation of the prewar School of Paris. In 1948, the same year James Baldwin immigrated to Paris, the abstract painter Georges Mathieu orchestrated the first exhibition of contemporary American and French painters, featuring works by Pollock, de Kooning, and Mark Tobey alongside European counterparts like Hans Hartung and Wols.19 Nuagisme or “cloudism”—a term used by Julien Alvard to describe a coterie of abstract painters that included René Laubies, Pierre Dmitrienko, Frédéric Benrath, and the American expat painter Sam Francis— explored abstraction through ethereal, cloud-like forms and transparent layers [FIG. 16]. Like the US-based movement of Lyrical Abstraction, it served as a poetic alternative to the geometric flatness of Cubism and machismo of Abstract Expressionism.

18 Mary Campbell, “Beauford Delaney in Ecstasy” in The Portraits of Beauford Delaney, exh. cat. (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2022), 21–22.

19 Debra Bricker Balken, “Chronology” in Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 (New York: Grey Art Museum, New York University; Munich: Hirmer Publishers, 2022), 29–30.

29

30

FIG. 16 Beauford Delaney, Untitled, 1961

At the same time, the influential art critic Michel Tapié (a distant relative of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec) held exhibitions and salons of European and American artists as he sought to delineate a bicontinental movement of what he termed art autre or “art of another kind.” Drawing inspiration from the nihilistic impulse of Dadaism, these artists rejected traditional pictorial conventions, embracing formlessness or informel, as the movement became known.20 With its emphasis on spontaneity and materiality, Informel became the European parallel to Abstract Expressionism and found resonance with artists such as Pierre Soulages and Wols. Tapié’s 1952 exhibition Un Art Autre at Galerie Paul Facchetti would solidify these crosscontinental connections, aligning American artists such as Alfonso Ossorio and Pollock with European painters like Jean Dubuffet, Henri Michaux, and Georges Mathieu. In his essay on Pollock for the Facchetti show, Tapié also observed that “America has become the real geopolitical crossroads for the confrontation of the most profound problems of the major artistic movements of the Orient and the Occident,” referring to works that embraced the calligraphic traditions of Asian art.21 Mark Tobey, who was often positioned as Pollock’s 20 Balken, 102.

21 Michel Tapié, “Jackson Pollock Is with Us” in Be-bomb: The Transatlantic War of Images and All That Jazz, 1946–1956, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2007), 528.

precursor, had begun exploring Eastern calligraphy techniques in the early 1920s in Seattle, culminating in script-based art following his travels to Japan and China in the mid-1930s [FIG. 17]. In Paris, Tobey connected with Americans like Claire Falkenstein, Paul Jenkins and, notably, Beauford Delaney. By the mid-1950s, Delaney’s work underwent another transformation, marked this time by intuitive, calligraphic brushwork that reflected influences from both Tobey and Art Informel [FIG. 18]. In the fall of 1956, his paintings and pastels were featured for the first time in Paris—in group and solo exhibitions at Galerie Prismes. In 1960, his work was included in a group exhibition at Galerie Facchetti.22 He also showed his work with the Nuagistes in several exhibitions curated by Julien Alvard, including Les Plus Mauvais Tableaux in 1955 and L’Insurrection Contre la Forme in 1957.23 31

FIG. 17 Mark Tobey, No 8 attempt to write chinese, 1934

FIG. 18 Beauford Delaney, Untitled, c. 1956

After two years living in hotels in Montparnasse, Delaney moved again in 1955—with Baldwin’s assistance—to a studio in the Parisian suburb of Clamart, where he would work quietly to reach what many consider to be the height of his pursuit of pure abstraction. In a 1956 letter to an acquaintance, Delaney says of his time there, “It’s difficult to move too often in Paris so I move further inside myself as I do this…My work grows the color deepens and the work this summer and fall have been some of my best this far.”24 22 Wicks, xviii.

23 Campbell, 20.

24 Letter to Mrs. Calley (?) dated December 10, 1956. Scm 88-33; Correspondence 1953–1959, Folder 1/17. Held in the Beauford Delaney Collection, Archives and Rare Books Division of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.

32

FIG. 19 Beauford Delaney, Untitled, 1960

In Clamart, Delaney dispensed with realism altogether, developing an almost religious preoccupation with color. Part of his inspiration was derived from the Impressionists, particularly the work of Monet, whose immersive cycle of Nympheas had been reinstalled in the Musée de l’Orangerie the year of Delaney’s arrival to Paris.25 This series of water lilies, with their all-over compositional approach that combined gradual and abrupt color shifts, certainly finds resonance in the luminescent, gossamer-like surfaces of the gouaches that would come to define Delaney’s Clamart period.

From a distance, these gouaches on paper appear almost monochromatic, but upon closer study, they reveal an intricate dance of countless hues, shifting and shimmering across their surface [FIG. 19]. The eye is pulled in multiple directions, never settling, as if caught in the perpetual glimmer of light itself. Brimming with brilliant swirls of paint applied in a fluid, calligraphic rhythm, the Clamart works exude a near-spiritual luminosity. Though Delaney’s abstractions share an affinity with Monet’s explorations of light, the illumination he sought was one not merely of atmosphere, but also one of 25 Balken, 101.

transcendence—a manifestation of an eternal, spiritual presence. This idea was articulated in a 1962 Art International article by Delaney’s friend and fellow painter Paul Jenkins, who described Delaney’s work at that time as “paintings which moved into a certain radiant generalization. In the paint [Delaney] let go of a specific identity and moved closer and closer toward the constant…these paintings could be churches of no denomination.”26 These luminous compositions made their public debut in Delaney’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Facchetti, held in 1960.

Delaney’s biographer David Leeming notes that, while lauded by his friends and well-received critically, the exhibition resulted in the sale of only two small works.27 In the months following, Delaney faced mounting economic hardship and increasingly acute psychiatric struggles, which culminated in a mental health crisis the following year. At the invitation of Darthea Speyer—the cultural attaché for the American Cultural Center in Paris and eventual proprietor of Galerie Darthea Speyer, as well as a devoted champion of Delaney’s work— Delaney set sail for Greece in the summer of 1961, seeking respite from his struggles at home. During his voyage, he was overtaken by paranoia and hallucinations so intense that he leapt into the sea in a desperate attempt to escape them. Rescued and eventually stabilized, he emerged from this traumatic event with a series of works that have been dubbed the “Rorschach tests”28 [FIG. 20].

FIG. 20 Beauford Delaney, Untitled, 1961

FIG. 21 Paul Jenkins Phenomena Dragon Seed, 1960

26 Paul Jenkins, “A Quiet Legend,” Art International, December 1962, 32.

27 Leeming, 143.

28 Joyce Henri Robinson, An Artistic Friendship: Beauford Delaney and Lawrence Calcagno, exh. cat. (University Park, PA: Palmer Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, 2001), 13.

33

34

These aqueous, turbulent paintings on paper reflect what Joyce Henri Robinson describes as a place where light is “not absent, but merely enshrouded or overwhelmed, struggling to hold the forces of darkness at bay.”29 With their rich veils of color and intuitive paint handling, the Rorschach tests share an affinity with the material experimentation of Tachism (from tache, to stain or splash), as well as the poured-paint techniques of his friend Paul Jenkins [FIG. 21].

In 1962, Delaney moved back to the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris, to a studio apartment that a young Henry Louis Gates Jr. described as “a garret that masqueraded as a loft, with the only divider of the room being a tattered purple curtain.”30 There, Delaney continued to produce luminous abstractions alongside stirring psychological portraits and notebook sketches of Parisian parks and the French countryside. Many of Delaney’s later Parisian portraits read as thickets of abstract brushwork, such as his barely-there portrait on paper of the professor Ahmed Bioud, whose face and shoulders dissolve into scumbles of bright lemon oil pigment [FIG. 22]. In his 1968 gouache on paper depicting Bernard

FIG. 22 Beauford Delaney, Ahmed Bioud, 1961

FIG. 23 Beauford Delaney, Portrait of Bernard Hassell, 1968

Hassell, one of Delaney and Baldwin’s closest friends, Delaney makes no attempt to delineate facial features at all, choosing instead to silhouette Hassell’s glowing yellow frame against a high-backed orange chair adrift in a mist of mossy green [FIG. 23]. These works exemplify Delaney’s late portraiture style, where representation gives way to pure sensation and where color and light become the primary conveyors of identity and presence.

29 Ibid.

30 Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Going to Meet the Man,” in Beauford Delaney: From New York to Paris, 10.

Throughout the mid-1960s and into the early 1970s, Delaney moved fluidly between abstraction and figuration, often blending the two in ways akin to his treatment of Bioud and Hassell. His “figurative abstractions” from this period blur the boundaries between subject and environment, dissolving the illusionistic structures that had previously anchored his sitters in discernible space in favor of compositions that blur representation and pure color. These portraits hover somewhere between presence and dissolution, transforming the tangible world into something transcendent. Yet, regardless of whether he worked figuratively or abstractly, Delaney’s pursuit in the final decade of his practice remained the same: to find visible an inner light amid escalating global and personal turmoil. Some critics have mistakenly framed his embrace of abstraction as a retreat from the racial and political struggles that marked his early years in America, as well as from the turbulence of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and ’70s.

Delaney’s engagement with abstraction—from his Cubist-inflected pastels of the 1940s, to the light-infused paintings of his Clamart period—were never an escape. Rather, for him, painting abstractly was a radical act of resistance and self-determination, an assertion of personal and artistic autonomy in a world that sought to confine Black artists to certain modes of representation. Abstraction was not merely an aesthetic exercise for Delaney, but instead a deeply personal and psychological one that reflected an artist grappling with questions of identity, belonging, and spiritual transcendence.

Though Delaney was physically removed from the frontlines of the civil rights movement, he remained deeply engaged with its cultural and intellectual currents. His close friendships with prominent figures like Baldwin, Henry Miller, and Richard Wright positioned him at the center of a transatlantic discourse on race, freedom of self-expression through art, and the role of the Black artist in shaping contemporary culture. His engagement with themes of racial unity and coexistence finds particular expression in a Mondrian-style gouache from 1970 [FIG. 24]. In this work, intersecting black lines form a symbolic crossroads, bisected by a looping, opaque yellow form and bold red rectangles that punctuate the composition against the white ground of the paper. Identified at the bottom of the page as “All The Races,” the title itself is a gesture toward Delaney’s utopian vision—one in which cultural and racial differences are not sites of division but instead sites of convergence.

35

36

FIG. 24 Beauford Delaney, All the Races, 1970

Here, abstraction is more than an aesthetic mode; it is a conceptual framework for envisioning a world defined not by separation, but by unity and coexistence among all races.

Far from existing in isolation, Delaney’s abstract works were deeply embedded in the evolving trajectory of American modernism—aligning with and, in some cases, anticipating the experimental approaches of other Black artists working to expand the boundaries of abstraction. This includes work by Sam Gilliam (1933–2022), who rejected rigid form and allowed color to dictate structure, as well as the gestural, heavily textured paintings of Jack Whitten (1939–2018). With its gridded composition and vibrant primary hues, All The Races certainly could be said to presage the color-grid, stacked blocks of Stanley Whitney (b. 1946) [FIG. 25].31

FIG. 25 Stanley Whitney, Untitled, 2024

“Among all my friends, my dear Beauford, you stand out as a shining example. You are the artist through and through, not just in the medium of paint but in the medium of life, which is more important.”32 Henry Miller wrote these words in a tribute, entitled “A few words of homage to the unforgettable Beauford Delaney,” read by the American novelist James Jones on the occasion of Delaney’s exhibition and celebration in 1969 at the Centre Culturel Américain in Paris. In his final years, the recognition Delaney had long been denied began to materialize—first with his Centre Culturel retrospective, followed by a comprehensive exhibition at Galerie Darthea Speyer in 1973. In 1978, The Studio Museum in Harlem organized Beauford Delaney: A Retrospective as part of its Black Masters Series—the artist’s first retrospective in America. By then, however, Delaney, institutionalized for mental illness at Saint-Anne’s Hospital in Paris since 1975, was largely unaware of this culminating moment in his career. He passed away on March 26, 1979, just as the world was beginning to acknowledge his impact.

31 In Dear Paris, on view at Gagosian (rue de Castiglione, Paris) from January 10 to February 28, 2024, Whitney cites Delaney as having a formative influence on his artistic trajectory: “Jazz musicians, writers, and artists like Beauford Delaney, James Baldwin, and more recently, Ed Clark, went to Paris for a creative freedom they couldn’t find in the United States. I’ve always wanted to spend more time in Paris, and in 2023, I finally did so. It was incredible to be in the city where so many of the great artists of the twentieth century, artists who were integral to my development as a painter, had lived and worked…” “Stanley Whitney: Dear Paris,” https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2024/stanley-whitney-dear-paris/.

32 Henry Miller, “A few words of homage to the unforgettable Beauford Delaney,” January 30, 1969. MS_3967.II, Box 7, Folder 18, Item 9. Held in the Beauford Delaney Papers, MS.3967, Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

37

38

FIG. 26 Beauford Delaney, Self-Portrait, c. 1970

“Is this the last day of my life? How does one tally the score?

Love is all and that I give the world. Painting only now begins to explore all that I have felt and suffered,” Delaney wrote in his journal in 1962.33 In the end, Delaney’s story is not simply one of an artist who spent his life struggling against poverty, discrimination, or the threat of erasure. Nor is his oeuvre one that can be contained within the confines of any singular movement, identity, or historical 33 Beauford Delaney, journal dated May 6, 1962, cited in Dr. Mary Campbell, “A Nuanced Look,” Wells International Foundation website, https://wellsinternationalfoundation.org/portraiture-exhibition/.

34 Baldwin, xi.

moment. To define Delaney’s life or work solely by the hardships he endured would be to diminish the profound and radical depth of his vision through the reductive lens of race or sexuality.

Regardless of the systemic barriers and the critical neglect he faced in his home country for most of his life, Delaney remained steadfast in his pursuit of art, asserting his presence in a world that too often sought to render him invisible. As James Baldwin wrote, “He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow.”34 His legacy is one of a quiet yet unyielding defiance, guided wholly by an unshakable belief in the transcendent power of artmaking. In every pastel line and in every swirling brushstroke, Delaney’s works on paper reveal a profound urgency to capture something at once fleeting and eternal, to transform solitude into communion, and to transmute darkness into light. His oeuvre reflects an artist in constant introspection, who ceaselessly explored new ways of seeing, feeling, and expressing his inner world. Suffused with warmth and luminosity, the works on paper of Beauford Delaney stand as testaments to the human spirit’s capacity for reinvention and the ability to find light in the darkest of circumstances. And nowhere is this more evident than in his drawings, where each mark tells the story of an artist who refused to be diminished, and who, through every mark on paper, sought to bring light into the world.

39

The Profound Reach of Beauford Delaney Jessica Lynne

40

FIG. 27 Beauford Delaney, Self-Portrait, c. 1970

I am pulled into Beauford Delaney’s self-portraits, first and always, by the eyes. Their somber sense of searching and an almost aloofness stays with me long after I have looked away. Then, of course, it is the color that haunts. I have a difficult time letting go of the way color becomes otherworldly in a Delaney painting, and I have been thinking about the hues of Self-Portrait, c. 1970 for some time now [FIG. 27]. Here, the painter renders a version of his face in forest green with hints of yellows and reds. A thick curve of black serves as a cropped haircut. A left ear is visible. The outline of a nose and lips are given shape, just enough. Something like a sweater, a jacket, or a shirt is depicted as more green and shades of blue. The layered strokes of a lighter blue—a sky—and white paint circle around this figure. The contrast of this choice—a self given over to the dim set against a backdrop full of light—creates a tension not easily resolved.

What has Delaney sublimated about himself through these decisions?

Am I supposed to know? I ask these questions before returning to the eyes. I track them as they track me.

“Nobody knows my face. The other face. What must be done?

Time runs out.” Delaney wrote these words in a journal during his time working as a janitor for the Western Union Company in Boston.1 In his book Amazing Grace, Delaney biographer David Leeming presents this Delaney of the late 1920s—young and seeking—as an artist negotiating the valences of his subjectivity, even before there was a language firm enough in his grasp to do so. This young painter, far away from the familiarity of his Knoxville, Tennessee, home, “knew that people did not know who he really was, and he was not sure he even did.”2 Yet, to encounter a Delaney self-portrait is to encounter an artist seemingly unafraid of this conundrum, as daunting as it may have been—as daunting as any person who has pursued the language of meaning-making and selfhood through art knows it to be. Perhaps then, we might consider portraiture as one element of Delaney’s attempt to articulate, through painting, a language for (Black) presence. And like his relationship to this form, (Black) presence is never fixed and ever expansive.

In Boston, Delaney mixed and mingled with the city’s prominent cohort of white abolitionists and members of Black high society. His search for a language of presence took root through the formal study

1 2

David Leeming, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney (New York: Karma, 2024), 45.

Ibid.

41

of art at institutions such as the Massachusetts Normal Art School and the Lowell Institute. Then again, Delaney, once a Southern child reared in the pews of the Methodist church—a preacher’s son, in fact—was intimately acquainted with the acts of seeking and reconstituting. As the twentieth century lurched forward, the Black church was a fertile ground for yearning: for enfranchisement, for safety, for freedom, for love. I imagine the remnants of this ethos hovered over Delaney as he strolled through Beacon Hill or Cambridge and certainly as he made his way to Harlem in 1929— portfolio, victrola, and clothes in tow. What is painting if not a faith act? A belief that composition, line, texture, and surface might leap its subject, viewer, and artist to some plane of revised truth.

42

FIG. 28 Beauford Delaney, Joseph Delaney, 1933

FIG. 29 Beauford Delaney, Untitled, c. 1940

In this way, Delaney was the most committed kind of believer, especially attentive to scenes of the quotidian. “By the time he reached New York,” Ann E. Gibson writes, “[Delaney] had developed a practiced and hard-edged naturalism that he began to suggestively soften, conveying to his viewers, not only the temperament of his sitter, but also something of his own response.”3 A 1933 pastel and charcoal drawing of the artist’s brother, Joseph (a talented artist in his own right) is both reverential and mysterious [FIG. 28]. An untitled pastel portrait of a young man from c. 1940 is as sly as it is

3

Ann E Gibson, “Gay and Black in Greenwich Village: Beauford Delaney’s Idylls of Integration,” in Beauford Delaney: From New York to Paris (University of Washington Press, 2004), 12.

pleasurable [FIG. 29]. A subtle reveal of desire, maybe, on the part of Delaney? In each, a blue: potent and pulsating. The New York that Delaney arrived in was the New York at the start of the Great Depression—a New York whose art, music, literature, and dance scenes had been catapulted into new dimensions by the cohort of Black individuals who had come to define the period now known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Situated roughly between the years 1920 and 1940, the Harlem Renaissance was a moment of radical creative output on the part of Black Americans. As Black migrants from the Southern United States (and various parts of the Caribbean) made their way to New York, the neighborhood of Harlem became a final landing place for many of these wanderers as the geographic contours of Manhattan shifted in the first decades of the twentieth century, pushing the island’s growing Black population north of established enclaves in the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village. The simultaneity of this physical movement, from the South but also within the city itself, gave way to an even greater psychic and social transformation of significant consequence. Black people began to assert a subjectivity previously not afforded them on the public stage. As has always been the case in times of undoing, it was the voices of the poets, the singers, the novelists, the musicians, and the painters that led an entire generation into a promised land.

It is worth stating the obvious. Contemporaneous depictions of Black folks in American popular culture were racist, debasing, and violent. D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) was the first film to ever screen at The White House. Al Jolson in blackface was a recurring sight as he danced and sang his way to Broadway success. Before this, through the novel, with its turn toward realism in the nineteenth century, emerged, as Toni Morrison argued, “a distancing Africanism that became the operative mode of a new cultural hegemony.”4 This American brand of Africanism, as she notes, was strongly urged, thoroughly serviceable, ego-reinforcing, and pervasive. Consider, if you will, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.5 Thus, as a diverse group of Black artists began to convene—together making, debating, and nurturing themselves throughout the 1920s—the art they produced directly countered

4 5

Toni Morrison, “Black Matters,” in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Random House, 1993), 8.

Ibid.

43

44

the broader perception of who Black people were with an attention to an interiority only they were able to conjure. “Negro life is not only establishing new contacts and founding new centers,” Alain Locke, considered the “dean” of the Harlem Renaissance, writes in the introduction to his foundational anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation, “it is finding a new soul. There is a fresh spiritual and cultural focusing. We have, as the heralding sign, an unusual outburst of creative expression. There is a renewed race-spirit that consciously and proudly sets itself apart.”6 The renaissance becomes a solar system comprised of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Van Der Zee, Aaron Douglas, and others, reveling in the pleasures of their selfhood as they called out to their people.

For Locke, a Harvard trained philosopher, the assertion of a “new negro” was an assertion of value in contrast to, borrowing again from Morrison, the distancing Africanism that loomed over cultural perceptions of Blackness. Culture, therefore, to Locke, was an important methodology of modernist rearticulation, if not resistance. His was a self-aware, young, politically savvy Black person. The “new negro,” then, this modern Black subject, was as much a potential reference to a single individual as it was a belief in the atmospheric condition that could define Black life after the Great War. Art historian Richard Powell writes: In a society that had recently suffered a war of tremendous proportions, and was increasingly changing into an urban, impersonal, and industry-driven machine, black culture was viewed, interchangeably as life-affirming, a libidinal fix, an antidote for ennui, a sanctuary for the spiritually bereft, a call back to nature, and a subway ticket to modernity.7 Locke’s perspective is typified in the work of Douglas, for example, a peer of Delaney, in whose paintings and murals one sees the meeting point of European modernism and Black American (and diasporic) iconography. Yet and still, the function of aesthetics were fertile grounds for intra-communal debate as Locke’s commitment to the avant garde, if you will, were challenged by historian, sociologist, and The Crisis editor W.E.B. Du Bois’s belief that art made by Black 6

7

Alain Locke, “Foreword,” The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), https://archive.org/details/the-new-negro/page/n17/ mode/2up.

Richard J. Powell, Black Art: A Cultural History (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 42.

artists should be used more aggressively as propaganda. This was a moment for the close consideration of the political efficacy of representation. If there is a reframing to be done, how? To what end? This was also a moment of convergence. Although the physical place of Harlem was a mecca for Black folks within and arriving to New York City, the mood it conjured—Black modernism—was equally atmospheric, stretching to cities throughout the United States, big and small, as well as transatlantically to cities like Paris where Delaney would find himself after leaving New York.

45

FIG. 30 Beauford Delaney, Untitled (New York City), c. 1948

Delaney would not, however, call Harlem home during his more than two-decade tenure in the city. He settled, instead, in the heart of bohemia in the city’s Greenwich Village, where his own life became a convergence of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Here was a Southern, Black gay man experiencing a kind of awakening as the city around him groaned itself through turbulence. New York, through Delaney’s ever-attentive, ever-sensitive eyes, was magnetic, charged, and inspiring. A city with a distinct heart and rhythm that could not help but be absorbed into Delaney’s output.8 The watercolor on paper, Untitled (New York City), c. 1948, is a cityscape teeming with this spirit [FIG. 30]. A simple rendering of the facade of a house featuring four unaligned windows is more or less centered.

8

Leeming, 59.

46

The lines of streetlights are red, blue, and yellow curves as even bolder yellow swirls pulsate with light. Always the light. Delaney manipulates perspective in the painting to give the impression of an entire city block as the painting’s foreground implies an evening street that also dances in the aforementioned colors. The artist’s 1945 pastel drawing of James Baldwin, who would become one of the painter’s closest confidants, is almost hyperbolic in fashion, though the now acclaimed writer is still recognizable, an eagerness passing through Delaney’s colors and representational liberties.

“Recognizable but hardly realistic, his forms knit into a single fabric, often united by a consistently textured surface, held together by integrated nets of color and line coexisting on the surface of his paintings,” Gibson asserts of the painter’s transformation.9 Still, Delaney was emphatically connected to the spirit of the Renaissance as the formalism of his Boston training grounds gave way to a new, modernist vocabulary.

This matter of the utility of representation seems to follow the Black artist, from my vantage point at least, as they create within dominant culture. The twenty-first century has not spared us such negotiations even as some public intellectuals and scholars contend that a new renaissance of Black art is upon us. We ask, still: is this the most respectable way to be seen? We debate: what is made legible and what remains opaque? We argue: how, if at all, will this serve us communally? It has been almost exactly one hundred years since Langston Hughes published his essay The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, and while the material conditions of Black people in the United States have changed quantifiably and qualitatively for the better since that time, I hear its echoes. In it, Hughes argues that for Black artists of his generation to truly be honest artists, they must seek “to change through the force of his art that old whispering ‘I want to be white,’ hidden in the aspirations of his people, to ‘Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro—and beautiful!’”10 To attend to this beauty, for Hughes, was to attend to the everyday folk, the “eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul” and not turn away from those expressions, gestures, dialects, and realities that marked, typically, poor and working-class Black people.11 Does one tell the

9 Gibson, 14.

10 Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Poetry Foundation, October 13, 2009, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ articles/69395/the-negro-artist-and-the-racial-mountain.

11 Ibid.

47

FIG. 31 Beauford Delaney, Central Park, 1950

entire truth about a people if one does not tell this truth, celebrate this beauty, this face, the poet seems to ask.

Delaney had his opinions on this contemporaneous rumination.

As Leeming writes, despite Delaney’s “closeness to painters who stressed the importance of ‘Negro’ or ‘American’ art, [he] increasingly resisted the idea of being defined as a Negro artist or even an American one.”12 His New York life coalesced around the two geographic centers of Harlem and Greenwich Village, each locale offering something distinct yet necessary for the maturing artist.

In the former, the painter could be immersed in dialogue with the likes of sculptor Augusta Savage or fellow painters Palmer Hayden or Cloyd Boykin of the Primitive African Art Center. The latter found him immersed within a white, queer milieu that included the singer Dante Pavone, painter Stuart Davis, and the modernist photographer Alfred Stieglitz to whom Delaney was introduced by Davis. What this meant for his work was a gradual releasing of realism and an embrace of abstraction that allowed him to blend, at times, motifs typically associated with Black communities with a commitment to taking up the aesthetic philosophies deployed by the European modernists (as seen in a pastel like Central Park (1950) [FIG. 31]).

Perhaps, what this meant for the larger meaning of his life beyond the canvas was a grappling akin to Du Bois’s poignant theory of double consciousness: a tension between two warring ideals.

12 Leeming, 71

48

How many faces were there for Delaney? If Black artists working in the interwar years bumped up against the dilemma of representation vis a vis “Americana,” it could be argued that queer, Black artists navigated a social, cultural, and political landscape all the more intricately. Queerness, on the one hand, was like an open secret. Locke himself was a gay man. The poet Countee Cullen, a friend of Delaneys, too. On the other hand, the matter of declaring one’s sexuality as a prominent fixture of one’s public life, as a Black artist or intellectual, was a contentious affair. And, as the debate of respectability rolled on, queerness was often unacknowledged in service of the larger project of racial progress. Delaney was well aware of this, and in addition to the creative company he kept downtown, this bohemian crew gave him a place where, in part, his identity as a gay man had space, even if it was not utopic.

In short, “Beauford was torn,” Leeming writes. “He kept his life in compartments—sex with whites but not with blacks, sex with temporary acquaintances and not with friends, safe politics with most whites, strong race identification with blacks.”13 I hear in Leeming’s words about Delaney, the words that the lesbian poet Audre Lorde used to describe her own days as a young, lesbian woman socializing in the Village in the 1950s: During the fifties in the Village, I didn’t know the few other Black women who were visibly gay at all well. Too often we found ourselves sleeping with the same white women. We recognized ourselves as exotic sister-outsiders who might gain little from banding together. Perhaps our strength might lay in our fewness, our rarity. That was the way it was downtown. And uptown, meaning the land of Black people, seemed very far away and hostile territory.14 Lorde was a first-generation Caribbean American coming of age in that decade, and though younger than Delaney, through her poetry she articulated an experience that many queer, Black people in New York City knew intimately. How to outrun a whisper? Where to find embrace? Indeed, how to live safely and proudly as a same-gender loving Black person in a time before Stonewall? (Should we not be asking this question again as we face, in 2025, a US administration 13 Leeming, 77.

14 Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1982), 177.

hell bent on destroying queer life?) As an artist, Delaney was hesitant to take up the justice mantle for either cause in an explicit manner, but the dizzying effects of a life compartmentalized surely weighed on him. Throughout his life, Delaney managed mental illness and often made due with little financial resources.

Still, he painted. For his was also the face of a man not solely marked by internal turbulence. Delaney was a man of jazz, of the blues, of classical music, of gospel. A singer and musician in his own right—a man who learned to listen to the street in order to see the street and its working-class dimensions. To do this, meant that, above all, Delaney wore the face of a man who understood what it meant to love. Love pulsates throughout his canvases. In fact, one beckons to me as I write this. Its reds, yellows, and oranges collide with one another, layered together to create a texture that cannot be ignored—“swirling topologies” as Powell has referred to them.15 The strokes are the result of an assured hand, an in-control wrist, a deliberate choice. A landscape that is perhaps psychic but a landscape nonetheless. A dreamscape of reds and yellows and oranges that Delaney titled Reve (c. 1958) [FIG. 32].

FIG. 32 Beauford Delaney, Reve, c. 1958

By 1958 Delaney had found his way to the City of Light. Like the New York he left, Paris teemed with exuberance, reeling from the Second World War, opening its arms to artists of all stripes. Delaney was not

15 Powell, 112.

49

50

alone as a Black American who had chosen expatriation. That city played host to writers, musicians, and performers such as Richard Wright, Josephine Baker, and, of course, Baldwin, who all sought a kind of creative and political refuge from the havoc racism wrought upon Black folks in the United States.

And with this move the abstraction that peered its way through the portraits and drawings of his New York world was ferociously embraced. These works betray inertia and instead convey a kineticism that is difficult to ignore. Watercolors painted in the early 1960s are not titled but their hallmarks are thick brushstrokes, pungent color, seductive light—always the light. In three works on paper from 1961 and 1962, Delaney dances playfully with the color green [FIG. 33, 34, 35]. A multi-colored gouache painting from 1966 brings the artist’s study of color into sharper focus [FIG. 36]. Via these works, I see the arc of Delaney’s practice in closer relation to lyrical abstraction as his painterly technique gave way to further emotional contemplation. These works have their own way of haunting, of beckoning to a viewer. Art history has not regularly associated Delaney with midcentury Abstract Expressionists, especially Black abstractionists such as Norman Lewis (who knew Delaney via the Harlem Artist Guild), or even painters who would arrive on the scene later, such as Frank Bowling, but it should. My own attention to Delaney’s portraiture that began this essay somewhat perpetuates this disconnect, but what I am trying to argue is that as he excavated his way to an understanding of who he was in this world—an understanding of his many faces—he did so with a keen eye toward the ability of the painting to be both a mirror and a projection, an articulation of that which is and that which is desired. This is a profound matter of life.

FIG. 33 Beauford Delaney, Untitled, 1961

FIG. 34 Beauford Delaney, Untitled, 1961

FIG. 35 Beauford Delaney, Untitled, 1962

51

FIG. 36 Beauford Delaney, Untitled, 1966

The scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. has qualified this sensitivity of Delaney as the painter’s “emotional realism.”16 Delaney gave the profound a shape over and over again. Revision, like Black living, is an expansive practice. He was a man of music, but before this, it bears repeating, he was a child of the Black church. He knew what it meant to succumb to the spellbinding force of divinity that can never actually be concretized yet still requires, on the part of those who follow, an effort to give it shape. Because of this, it is also true that, really, I see no difference between the more figurative portraits that won’t leave me and the abstract works that seemingly reach towards the plane beyond the earthly. They live on one line for me. For Delaney too, I’m sure.

16 Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Going to Meet The Man,” in Beauford Delaney: From New York to Paris (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 10.

Plates

52

PL. 1 Harlem Athlete, 1929

PL. 2 Untitled (Portrait of a Man), c. 1930

PL. 3 Joseph Delaney, 1933

PL. 4 Untitled, 1935

PL. 5 Untitled, c. 1940

PL. 6 Head of a Poet, 1944

PL. 7 James Baldwin, 1945

PL. 8 Untitled (Washington Square Park), c. 1940s

PL. 9 Untitled (New York City), c. 1948

PL. 10 Sketchbook drawing (Stained Glass, Cathedral), c. 1945

PL. 11 Untitled (New York City), late 1940s

PL. 12 Untitled (Traffic Signals), 1945

PL. 13 Greene Street, 1950

PL. 14 Untitled, 1946

PL. 15 Self-Portrait (Yaddo), 1950

PL. 16 Yaddo, 1950

PL. 17 Central Park, 1950

PL. 18 Untitled, 1951

PL. 19 Paris, 1953

PL. 20 Chartres, 1954

PL. 21 Untitled (Abstract Circles), c. 1956

PL. 22 Untitled (Saxophone Player), late 1950s

PL. 23 Untitled, c. 1956

PLS. 24–27 Untitled, c. 1956

PL. 28 Untitled (Self-Portrait Study), late 1950s

PL. 29 Untitled, 1958

PL. 30 Untitled, 1958

PL. 31 Untitled, 1958

PL. 32 Untitled, c. 1959

PL. 33 Untitled (Clamart), 1959

PL. 34 Untitled, 1959

PL. 35 Untitled, 1960

PL. 36 Untitled, 1960

PL. 37 Untitled, c. 1960

PL. 38 Untitled, 1960

PL. 39 Untitled, 1961

PL. 40 Ahmed Bioud, 1961

PL. 41 Untitled, 1961

PL. 42 Untitled, 1961

PL. 43 Untitled, 1961

PL. 44 Untitled, 1961

PL. 45 Untitled, 1961

PL. 46 Untitled, 1961

PL. 47 Untitled, 1961

PL. 48 Untitled, 1961

PL. 49 Untitled, 1962

PL. 50 Untitled, 1962

PL. 51 Self-Portrait, c. 1962

PL. 52 Self-Portrait, 1962

PL. 53 Self-Portrait, 1962

PL. 54 Untitled (Red Bar), 1962

PL. 55 Untitled, c. 1966

PL. 56 Untitled, 1963

PL. 57 Self-Portrait, 1953

PL. 58 Self-Portrait, c. 1963

PL. 59 Untitled, 1964

PL. 60 Untitled, 1964

PL. 61 Self-Portrait, 1964

PL. 62 Mother’s Portrait (aka Portrait of Delia Delaney), 1964

PL. 63 Untitled, 1965

PL. 64 Untitled, c. 1967

PL. 65 Untitled, 1965

PL. 66 Untitled, 1966

PL. 67 Untitled (Self-Portrait), 1965

PL. 68 Self-Portrait, c. 1970

PL. 69 Untitled (Portrait of James Baldwin), c. 1966

PL. 70 Untitled (Portrait of James [Jimmy] Baldwin), n.d.

PL. 71 Untitled (Istanbul, Turkey), 1966

PL. 72 Henry Miller, c. 1967

PL. 73 Portrait of Bernard Hassell, 1968

PL. 74 Bernard Hassell, 1968

PL. 75 Untitled (Self-Portrait), c. 1968

PL. 76 Untitled, c. 1968

PL. 77 Untitled (African Figure), c. 1968

PL. 78 Untitled (West African Figurine), early 1960s

PL. 79 Untitled, 1969

PL. 80 Untitled, 1969

PL. 81 Sketchbook 7 (Wabash), c. 1969

PL. 82 Sketchbook 9 (Croquis Dessi), n.d.

PL. 83 (ABOVE) Sketchbook 3 (1199), n.d.

PL. 84 (BELOW) Sketchbook 6 (Rich Art), n.d.

PL. 85 Sketchbook 2, n.d.

PL. 86 Untitled, c. 1970

PL. 87 Self-Portrait, c. 1970

PL. 88 Self-Portrait, 1970

PL. 89 Untitled, c. 1971

PL. 90 Self-Portrait in a Paris Bath House, 1971

Checklist

204

Unless noted otherwise all works © Estate of Beauford Delaney, by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator, Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

PL. 7 James Baldwin, 1945 Pastel on paper 23 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches (59.7 x 47 cm) Photo credit: Ben Conant Courtesy of MacDowell

PL. 1 Harlem Athlete, 1929 Charcoal on laid paper 19 5/8 x 14 3/4 inches (49.8 x 37.5 cm) Courtesy of the Fredrick Marshall Lowery Family Collection

PL. 8 Untitled (Washington Square Park), c. 1940s Ink on spiral notebook paper 4 1/8 x 7 inches (10.2 x 17.8 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art

PL. 2 Untitled (Portrait of a Man), c. 1930 Pastel on blue paper 19 5/8 x 15 3/4 inches (49.8 x 40 cm) PL. 3 Joseph Delaney, 1933 Pastel and charcoal on paper 23 3/4 x 16 1/4 inches (60.3 x 15.9 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art PL. 4 Untitled, 1935 Charcoal on paper 24 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches (62.9 x 47.6 cm) Image credit: Jim Wells Productions, Inc. From the Collection of Mike and Leah Berry, Knoxville TN PL. 5 Untitled, c. 1940 Pastel on laid paper 23 3/4 x 18 3/4 inches (60.3 x 47.6 cm) PL. 6 Head of a Poet, 1944 Pastel on paper 26 1/2 x 15 1/2 inches (67.3 x 39.4 cm) Art & Artifacts Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library

PL. 9 Untitled (New York City), c. 1948 Watercolor on paper 15 1/2 x 22 1/2 inches (39.4 x 57.2 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art PL. 10 Sketchbook drawing (Stained Glass, Cathedral), c. 1945 Ink on paper in spiral sketchbook 5 1/8 x 8 1/4 inches (13 x 21 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art PL. 11 Untitled (New York City), late 1940s Graphite on newsprint 8 x 5 inches (20.3 x 12.7 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art PL. 12 Untitled (Traffic Signals), 1945 Oil on canvas 36 x 40 inches (91.4 x 101.6 cm) PL. 13 Greene Street, 1950 Pastel on paper 31 7/8 x 29 1/4 inches (81 x 74 cm) Photo credit: Julia Aknin Courtesy of David Aknin

PL. 14 Untitled, 1946 Pastel on paper 17 x 23 1/8 inches (43.2 x 58.7 cm) Private Collection, Memphis, Tennessee PL. 15 Self-Portrait (Yaddo), 1950 Pastel, charcoal, and watercolor on paper 15 x 12 1/2 inches (38.1 x 31.8 cm) From the Collection of Nicholas Schonberger PL. 16 Yaddo, 1950 Pastel on paper 18 x 24 inches (45.7 x 61 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art PL. 17 Central Park, 1950 Pastel on paper 18 x 24 inches (45.7 x 61 cm) Courtesy of David Aknin PL. 18 Untitled, 1951 Pastel on paper 18 3/16 x 24 1/8 inches (46.2 x 61.3 cm) PL. 19 Paris, 1953 Pastel on paper 19 x 24 1/2 inches (48.3 x 62.2 cm) Private Collection PL. 20 Chartres, 1954 Oil on paperboard 30 x 21 5/8 inches (76.2 x 54.9 cm)

PL. 21 Untitled (Abstract Circles), c. 1956 Pastel and mixed media on paper 25 1/4 x 19 1/2 inches (64.1 x 49.5 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art PL. 22 Untitled (Saxophone Player), late 1950s Ink on spiral notebook paper 8 x 5 1/2 inches (20.3 x 14 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art PL. 23 Untitled, c. 1956 Ink on paper 12 x 9 inches (30.5 x 22.5 cm) PL. 24 Untitled, c. 1956 Ink on paper 12 x 9 inches (30.5 x 22.5 cm) PL. 25 Untitled, c. 1956 Ink on paper 12 x 9 inches (30.5 x 22.5 cm) PL. 26 Untitled, c. 1956 Ink on paper 12 x 9 inches (30.5 x 22.5 cm) PL. 27 Untitled, c. 1956 Ink on paper 12 x 9 inches (30.5 x 22.5 cm) PL. 28 Untitled (Self-Portrait Study), late 1950s Ink on spiral notebook paper Nine sheets, each: 5 1/2 x 4 1/2 inches (14 x 11.4 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art

205

PL. 29 Untitled, 1958 Gouache, watercolor, and ink on paper 24 1/8 x 19 5/8 inches (61.3 x 49.8 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of Wokie Massaquoi-Wicks PL. 30 Untitled, 1958 Gouache and watercolor on paper 25 5/8 x 19 5/8 inches (65.1 x 49.8 cm) PL. 31 Untitled, 1958 Gouache on paper 24 1/8 x 19 5/8 inches (61.3 x 49.8 cm) 206

PL. 32 Untitled, c. 1959 Oil on canvas 31 5/8 x 25 1/2 inches (80.3 x 64.8 cm) PL. 33 Untitled (Clamart), 1959 Watercolor and gouache on paper 24 1/2 x 18 inches (62.2 x 45.7 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art PL. 34 Untitled, 1959 Gouache on paper 13 3/4 x 11 inches (34.9 x 27.9 cm) PL. 35 Untitled, 1960 Gouache and watercolor on paper 25 5/8 x 19 1/2 inches (65.1 x 49.5 cm) PL. 36 Untitled, 1960 Watercolor on paper 25 5/8 x 19 3/4 inches (65.1 x 50.2 cm) PL. 37 Untitled, c. 1960 Watercolor and gouache on paper 25 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches (64.8 x 49.5 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art PL. 38 Untitled, 1960 Gouache and watercolor on paper 25 5/8 x 19 5/8 inches (65.1 x 49.8 cm)

PL. 39 Untitled, 1961 Gouache on paper 25 1/2 x 18 7/8 inches (64.8 x 47.9 cm) PL. 40 Ahmed Bioud, 1961 Oil on paper 25 7/8 x 19 3/4 inches (65.7 x 50.2 cm) PL. 41 Untitled, 1961 Gouache and watercolor on paper 24 7/8 x 17 3/4 inches (63.2 x 45.1 cm) PL. 42 Untitled, 1961 Watercolor on paper 10 5/8 x 7 7/8 inches (27 x 20 cm) PL. 43 Untitled, 1961 Watercolor on paper 25 3/4 x 19 5/8 inches (65.4 x 49.8 cm) PL. 44 Untitled, 1961 Watercolor on paper 25 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches (65.4 x 50.2 cm) PL. 45 Untitled, 1961 Gouache on paper 19 3/4 x 26 inches (50.2 x 66 cm) PL. 46 Untitled, 1961 Gouache on paper 19 7/8 x 26 inches (50.5 x 66 cm) PL. 47 Untitled, 1961 Gouache and watercolor on paper 25 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches (65.4 x 50.2 cm) PL. 48 Untitled, 1961 Gouache on paper 25 7/8 x 19 3/4 inches (65.7 x 50.2 cm) PL. 49 Untitled, 1962 Watercolor on paper 25 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches (65.4 x 50.2 cm)

PL. 50 Untitled, 1962 Watercolor on paper 25 1/2 x 19 3/4 inches (64.8 x 50.2 cm)

PL. 59 Untitled, 1964 Gouache and watercolor on Arches paper 22 3/8 x 15 3/8 inches (56.8 x 39.1 cm)

PL. 51 Self-Portrait, c. 1962 Crayon on newsprint 25 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches (65.4 x 50.2 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art

PL. 60 Untitled, 1964 Gouache and watercolor on paper 22 3/8 x 15 1/8 inches (56.8 x 38.4 cm)

PL. 52 Self-Portrait, 1962 Charcoal on paper 17 x 12 7/8 inches (43.2 x 32.7 cm) PL. 53 Self-Portrait, 1962 Oil on canvas 25 1/2 x 21 1/4 inches (64.8 x 54 cm) Collection of halley k harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld PL. 54 Untitled (Red Bar), 1962 Gouache on paper 19 5/8 x 10 1/8 inches (49.8 x 25.7 cm) PL. 55 Untitled, c. 1966 Gouache and ink on paper 6 7/8 x 5 1/4 inches (17.5 x 13.3 cm) PL. 56 Untitled, 1963 Gouache on Arches paper 30 x 22 1/4 inches (76.2 x 56.5 cm) PL. 57 Self-Portrait, 1953 Graphite on paper 14 1/4 x 18 3/4 inches (36.2 x 47.6 cm) PL. 58 Self-Portrait, c. 1963 Charcoal and pastel on newsprint 14 1/4 x 18 3/4 inches (36.2 x 47.6 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art

PL. 61 + COVER Self-Portrait, 1964 Watercolor and gouache on paper 29 3/4 x 22 1/4 inches (75.6 x 56.5 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy Ruth and Joe Fielden, Knoxville PL. 62 Mother’s Portrait (aka Portrait of Delia Delaney), 1964 Oil on canvas 25 1/2 x 21 1/4 inches (64.8 x 54 cm) PL. 63 Untitled, 1965 Gouache and watercolor on paper 25 3/4 x 19 3/4 inches (65.4 x 50.2 cm) PL. 64 Untitled, c. 1967 Watercolor on paper 25 3/4 x 20 inches (65.4 x 50.8 cm) PL. 65 Untitled, 1965 Gouache and watercolor on paper 20 1/4 x 13 7/8 inches (51.4 x 35.2 cm) PL. 66 Untitled, 1966 Gouache on paper 13 1/4 x 8 5/8 inches (33.7 x 21.9 cm) PL. 67 Untitled (Self-Portrait), 1965 Ink on paper 20 7/8 x 14 1/3 inches (53 x 36.4 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of Wokie Massaquoi-Wicks PL. 68 Self-Portrait, c. 1970 Ink on paper 21 x 14 3/8 inches (53.3 x 36.5 cm)

207

PL. 69 Untitled (Portrait of James Baldwin), c. 1966 Ink on paper in sketchbook 4 x 5 1/2 inches (10.2 x 14 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art PL. 70 Untitled (Portrait of James [Jimmy] Baldwin), n.d.

Ballpoint pen on spiral paper 3 3/4 x 5 1/8 inches (9.5 x 13 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art

208

PL. 71 Untitled (Istanbul, Turkey), 1966 Watercolor on paper 30 x 22 inches (76.2 x 55.9 cm) Courtesy of Falen and Clark Gillespie PL. 72 Henry Miller, c. 1967 Watercolor and graphite on paper 12 1/8 x 9 3/8 inches (30.8 x 23.8 cm) PL. 73 Portrait of Bernard Hassell, 1968 Gouache on paper 12 1/8 x 9 3/8 inches (30.8 x 23.8 cm) PL. 74 Bernard Hassell, 1968 Gouache and watercolor on paper 12 1/8 x 9 3/8 inches (30.8 x 23.8 cm) PL. 75 Untitled (Self-Portrait), c. 1968 Oil monoprint on paper 25 3/4 x 19 1/2 inches (65.4 x 49.5 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art From the Collection of Nancy and Charlie Wagner PL. 76 Untitled, c. 1968 Oil on paper 25 1/4 x 19 3/4 inches (64.1 x 50 cm)

PL. 77 Untitled (African Figure), c. 1968 Oil monoprint on paper 25 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches (64.8 x 49.5 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art PL. 78 Untitled (West African Figurine), early 1960s Ink on foil wrapper 6 1/2 x 4 inches (16.5 x 10.2 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art PL. 79 Untitled, 1969 Ink on paper 10 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches (26.7 x 21 cm) PL. 80 Untitled, 1969 Ink on paper 10 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches (26.7 x 21 cm) PL. 81 Sketchbook 7 (Wabash), c. 1969 Ballpoint pen on spiral paper 4 x 6 inches (10.2 x 15.2 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art PL. 82 Sketchbook 9 (Croquis Dessi), n.d.

Ballpoint pen on spiral paper 5 1/2 x 8 5/8 inches (14 x 21.9 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art PL. 83 Sketchbook 3 (1199), n.d.

Watercolor on spiral paper 6 x 9 1/8 inches (15.2 x 23.2 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art PL. 84 Sketchbook 6 (Rich Art), n.d.

Ballpoint pen on spiral paper 6 1/8 x 4 1/8 inches (15.6 x 10.5 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art

PL. 85 Sketchbook 2, n.d.

Oil pastel on paper 5 x 8 inches (12.7 x 20.32 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art PL. 86 Untitled, c. 1970 Gouache and ink on paper 19 5/8 x 13 inches (49.8 x 33 cm) PL. 87 Self-Portrait, c. 1970 Oil on board 29 1/2 x 22 1/8 inches (75 x 56 cm) PL. 88 Self-Portrait, 1970 Gouache on paper 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches (31.8 x 24.1 cm) Photo Credit: Bruce Cole Collection of David Leeming PL. 89 Untitled, c. 1971 Ink, gouache, pastel, graphite, and ballpoint pen on paper 11 3/4 x 9 5/8 inches (29.8 x 24.4 cm) PL. 90 Self-Portrait in a Paris Bath House, 1971 Oil on canvas 21 5/8 x 18 1/8 inches (54.9 x 46 cm) Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art

ESSAY ILLUSTRATIONS Unless noted otherwise all works

by Beauford Delaney © Estate of Beauford Delaney by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator, Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY FIG. 1 Paris Window, 1953 Image courtesy the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Lotte Falkenberg 93.152. © Estate of Beauford Delaney FIG. 2 The Burning Bush, 1941 Collection of The Newark Museum of Art Purchase by exchange, 1988. Gift of Emilie Coles from the J. Ackerman Coles Collection, Mrs. Lewis Ballantyne and the Bequest of Louis Bamberger 88.225 © Estate of Beauford Delaney FIG. 3 Al Hirschfeld Caricature of Beauford Delaney, 1941 Courtesy of the Al Hirschfeld Foundation FIG. 4 Illustration of Harriet Tubman in “Unsung Americans Sung,” 1944, edited

by W.C. Handy FIG. 5 Ethel Waters, 1940 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; purchase partially supported through the generosity of the Abraham and Virginia Weiss Charitable Trust, Amy and Marc Meadows, in honor of Wendy Wick Reaves; and Jewell Robinson FIG. 6 Announcement with checklist for exhibit of Portrait Sketches by Beauford Delaney, 1930 Courtesy of Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

209

FIG. 7 Georgia O’Keeffe Beauford Delaney, 1943 Photo Credit: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY © 2025 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York FIG. 8 Anthony Barboza Portrait of James Baldwin in His Home, 1978 Photo Credit: Anthony Barboza / Getty Images

210

FIG. 9 (see PL. 7) James Baldwin, 1945 Photograph by Ben Conant Courtesy of MacDowell FIG. 10 James Baldwin, 1963 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution FIG. 11 Untitled (Yellow, Red, and Black Circles for James Baldwin, Istanbul), 1966 Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art FIG. 12 (see PL. 14) Untitled, 1946 FIG. 13 Twilight Street, 1946 Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, Gift of Martha Ullman West in memory of Allen Ullman FIG. 14 (see PL. 19) Paris, 1953

FIG. 17 Mark Tobey No 8 attempt to write chinese, 1934 © 2025 Mark Tobey / Seattle Art Museum, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York FIG. 18 (see PL. 24) Untitled, c. 1956 FIG. 19 (see PL. 36) Untitled, 1960 FIG. 20 (see PL. 43) Untitled, 1961 FIG. 21 Paul Jenkins Phenomena Dragon Seed, 1960 © Paul Jenkins / licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2025 FIG. 22 (see PL. 40) Ahmed Bioud, 1961 FIG. 23 (see PL. 73) Portrait of Bernard Hassell, 1968 FIG. 24 All the Races, 1970 FIG. 25 Stanley Whitney Untitled, 2024 © Stanley Whitney FIG. 26 (see PL. 68) Self-Portrait, c. 1970 FIG. 27 (see PL. 87) Self-Portrait, c. 1970

FIG. 15 (see PL. 20) Chartres, 1954

FIG. 28 (see PL. 3) Joseph Delaney, 1933 Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art

FIG. 16 (see PL. 45) Untitled, 1961

FIG. 29 (see PL. 5) Untitled, c. 1940 FIG. 30 (see PL. 9) Untitled (New York City), c. 1948 Photo credit: Knoxville Museum of Art

FIG. 31 (see PL. 17) Central Park, 1950 FIG. 32 Reve, c. 1958 FIG. 33 (see PL. 47) Untitled, 1961 FIG. 34 (see PL. 48) Untitled, 1961 FIG. 35 (see. PL. 50) Untitled, 1962 FIG. 36 (see PL. 66) Untitled, 1966 211

Contributors

Rebecca DiGiovanna is Assistant Curator at The Drawing Center.

Laura Hoptman is Executive Director of The Drawing Center.

Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic.

She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Artforum, The Believer, Frieze, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and Oxford American. She is the recipient of a 2020 Research and Development award from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, a 2020 Arts Writer Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation, and the inaugural Beverley Art Writers Travel Grant awarded in 2022 by the American Australian Association. Lynne holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

Board of Directors

Staff

Co-Chair Valentina Castellani

Laura Hoptman Executive Director

Co-Chair Hilary Hatch Treasurer Jane Dresner Sadaka Secretary Iris Z. Marden Dita Amory Frances Beatty Adler David R. Baum Brad Cloepfil Andrea Crane Stacey Goergen Amy Gold Harry Tappan Heher Priscila Hudgins KAWS Rhiannon Kubicka Adam Pendleton David M. Pohl Nancy Poses Almine Ruiz-Picasso David Salle Curtis Talwst Santiago Joyce Siegel Rirkrit Tiravanija Barbara Toll Jean-Edouard van Praet d’Amerloo Waqas Wajahat Linda Yablonsky Emeritus Eric Rudin

Olga Valle Tetkowski Deputy Director Rebecca Brickman Director of Development Rebecca DiGiovanna Assistant Curator Sarah Fogel Registrar Aimee Good Director of Education and Community Programs Isabella Kapur Assistant Curator of Research Valerie Newton Director of Retail and Visitor Services Anna Oliver Bookstore Manager Nona Poydras Visitor Services Associate Isa Riquezes Communications and Marketing Associate Olivia Shao Burger Collection & TOY Meets Art Curator Tiffany Shi Development Manager Nathaniel Steen Visitor Services Associate Allison Underwood Director of Communications and Marketing Aaron Zimmerman Operations Manager & Head Preparator

Published on the occasion of the exhibition In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney The Drawing Center May 30–September 14, 2025 Organized by Rebecca DiGiovanna, Assistant Curator, and Laura Hoptman, Executive Director In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney is made possible

by Lonti Ebers, Agnes Gund, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Alice and Tom Tisch, and Isabel Stainow Wilcox.

This is number 159 of the Drawing Papers, a series of publications documenting The Drawing Center’s exhibitions and programs and providing a forum for the study of drawing.

Editor Joanna Ahlberg Design Dandelion Printing & Binding Shapco Printing, Minneapolis, MN About the Type This book is set in Publico Text (Roman, Italic, and Bold). It is part of the Publico Collection, designed

by Ross Milne, Christian Schwartz, Paul Barnes, Kai Bernau, and Greg Gazdowicz, and released incrementally

by Commercial Type in 2009, 2013, and 2014. This book also uses Plain (Regular and Italic), which was designed by François Rappo and released by Optimo Type Foundry in 2014.

ISBN 979-8-9876009-7-9 © 2025 The Drawing Center All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without written permission from The Drawing Center.

ISBN 979-8987600979

9

798987

600979