Beauford Delaney

Knoxville

Beauford Delaney was born on 30 December 1901 in Knoxville, Tennessee, the eighth of ten children. His father, Samuel Delaney, was a Methodist minister and barber; his mother, Delia Johnson Delaney, had been born into slavery.[2]

Only four of the ten children lived to adulthood. Beauford and his younger brother Joseph both became painters, and both had long careers.

He was taught locally by a white Knoxville artist, Lloyd Branson, who saw the work and paid for him to go north. From 1924 to 1929 he studied in Boston: at the Massachusetts Normal Art School, at the South Boston School of Art, and in evening classes at the Copley Society. He copied in the museums in his own time. In later years he described himself as largely self-taught.[2]

Greenwich Village

In 1929 Delaney moved to New York and stayed for twenty-four years. He went first to Harlem, arrived at the start of the Depression, and was poor throughout.[2]

His first solo show came the following year, at the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library.[3]

He lived and worked in Greenwich Village, mostly at 181 Greene Street, in a cold-water loft with no bath. He painted the streets, the fire escapes, the hydrants, the traffic and the people: portraits of neighbours, of musicians, of Ethel Waters, W. C. Handy, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington.[2]

The style is immediately recognisable. Delaney laid on paint thickly, outlined shapes in black, and used colour at a pitch that has nothing to do with the actual colour of a New York street. Yellow was already dominant.[4]

His pastel portraits took W. E. B. Du Bois and Duke Ellington as sitters. He worked for the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s, showed regularly and sold rarely. He supported himself with odd jobs: part-time teaching at a Village art school, custodial work at the Whitney Museum, and a spell as a gallery telephone operator.[5]

The Smithsonian's account of him puts the Greene Street years plainly: the street became to Delaney what Mont Sainte-Victoire had been to Cézanne.[2]

James Baldwin

In 1940 James Baldwin, then fifteen and the stepson of a Harlem preacher, knocked on the door at 181 Greene Street. He had been given the address by Emile Capouya, a fellow pupil at DeWitt Clinton High School who worked with him on the school literary magazine. Delaney was thirty-eight.[1]

In Delaney's rooms Baldwin heard the jazz and blues records that his church upbringing had kept away from him.

The friendship lasted for the rest of Delaney's life. Baldwin wrote about him repeatedly and in the strongest terms he used about anyone: he called him his spiritual father, and said that Delaney was the first living proof he had that a Black man could be an artist.[1]

Baldwin also credited Delaney with teaching him to look. In an account Baldwin repeated often, Delaney pointed at a puddle in the street. He made Baldwin see the oil in it, then the colours in the oil, then the reflection of the buildings above. Baldwin dated his ability to describe the physical world to that afternoon.[1]

Delaney painted Baldwin many times over nearly forty years, from a boy to a middle-aged man. The first was Dark Rapture, painted in 1941.

When Baldwin bought a one-way ticket to Paris in 1948, Delaney encouraged him to go and promised to follow.[1]

Paris

Delaney spent a fellowship year at the Yaddo colony in upstate New York in 1950 and 1951, then sailed for Europe in 1953, intending to go on to Rome. He stayed in Paris for the rest of his life. Baldwin was already living in France, and a number of Black American writers and artists had settled there.[2]

He lived first in the city and then at Clamart, in the southern suburbs, in conditions that were often close to destitute. Friends, Baldwin among them, sent money and bought paintings to keep him going.

The work changed in Paris. The New York street scenes gave way to abstraction: fields of colour, mostly yellow, built up in swirls and dabs with no subject at all. He went on painting portraits alongside them, of Baldwin, of Henry Miller, of Marian Anderson and of himself.[4]

The abstractions are what his reputation now rests on. They were made at the same time as American abstract expressionism and look nothing like it, being warmer, denser and made out of light rather than gesture. What they draw on is Van Gogh and the Fauves rather than anything happening in New York.[4]

Yellow

Yellow is the colour Delaney is identified with, and he used it from the New York years onward, first as the light in a street scene and then as the whole surface of a painting.

Baldwin wrote about it directly, and connected it to the light in the Greene Street loft and to Delaney's own account of what colour was for. Delaney himself said little about it in print. The Paris canvases of the 1960s are built out of yellow in layers, applied in swirls, dabs and short strokes, with other colours pushed to the edges or buried under it.[1]

Illness

Delaney heard voices from at least the late 1950s and the condition worsened through the 1960s. He drank heavily, was hospitalised more than once, and in 1961, on a boat to Greece, attempted to drown himself.[3]

He kept working through it for as long as he could. Friends organised exhibitions and sales, and the Paris dealer who represented him arranged shows, but he never earned enough to be secure.

Baldwin, who had called Delaney his spiritual father, looked after him until schizophrenia made that impossible. By the mid-1970s Delaney could not live alone. In 1975 he was committed to the psychiatric hospital of Sainte-Anne in Paris, and he stayed there until his death.

Beauford Delaney died at Sainte-Anne on 26 March 1979, aged seventy-seven. He is buried in the cemetery at Thiais, south of Paris.[3]

Reassessment

Delaney's work was scattered and his reputation was thin at his death. His estate was disputed and much of the work stayed in storage for years.

In 1978, the year before he died, the Studio Museum in Harlem opened a retrospective of his work, the first exhibition in its Black Master series. He was in hospital in Paris and did not see it.[2]

Interest built again from the 1990s. Museums in the United States began acquiring, a substantial biography appeared in 1998, and exhibitions in Knoxville, New York and Paris presented the New York and Paris periods together for the first time. Prices for his work rose sharply over the following two decades, and the Greenwich Village paintings and the Paris abstractions are now shown as one body of work rather than two.

In 2020 the Knoxville Museum of Art opened a permanent gallery devoted to Beauford and Joseph Delaney, and portraits by him now hang in major American collections.

Why Beauford Delaney matters

Delaney is a rare case of a painter whose two careers are both first-rate and look almost unrelated. The Greenwich Village street scenes of the 1930s and 1940s are among the strongest American urban paintings of the period, and the Paris abstractions of the 1960s are a body of colour painting with no close relative.

He also stands at the centre of a network that is easy to miss. Through Delaney, the New York of the 1930s connects to the Paris of the 1950s and to James Baldwin's writing. Baldwin's account of learning to see in a Greene Street loft is one of the clearest descriptions anyone has given of what a painter can teach a writer.