BEAUFORD DELANEY (d: 03/26/1979) was an American modernist painter born on this date. He is remembered for his work with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his later works in abstract expressionism following his move to Paris in the 1950s. Beauford’s younger brother, Joseph, was also a noted painter.
When he was a teenager, he got a job as a “helper” at the Post Sign Company. However, he and his younger brother Joseph were drawing signs of their own. Then some of his work was noticed by Lloyd Branson, an elderly American Impressionist and Knoxville’s best known artist. By the early 1920s, Delaney became the apprentice of Branson. With Branson’s encouragement, the 23-year-old Delaney migrated north to Boston to study art. With perseverance, he achieved the artist’s education he desired, including informal studies at the Massachusetts Normal School, the South Boston School of Art and the Copley Society. He learned what he called the “essentials” of classical technique. It was also while in Boston that Delaney had his first “intimate experience” with a young man in the Public Garden. Through letters of introduction from Knoxville, he also received what he referred to as a “crash course” in black activist politics and ideas by associating socially during his years in Boston with some of the most sophisticated and radical African Americans of the time, such as James Weldon Johnson, writer, diplomat and rights activist; William Monroe Trotter, founder of the National Equal Rights League; and Butler Wilson, board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. By 1929, the essentials of his artistic education complete, Beauford decided to leave Boston and head for New York.
His arrival in New York City at the time of the Harlem Renaissance was exciting. Harlem was then the center of black cultural life in the United States. But it was also the time of the Great Depression, and it was this that Beauford was confronted with on his arrival. “Went to New York in 1929 from Boston all alone with very little money…this was the depression, and I soon discovered that most of these people were people out of work and just doing what I was doing – sitting and figuring out what to do for food and a place to sleep.”
Delaney felt an immediate affinity with this “multitude of people of all races – spending every night of their lives in parks and cafes” surviving on next to nothing. Their courage and shared camaraderie inspired him to feel that “somehow, someway there was something I could manage if only with some stronger force of will I could find the courage to surmount the terror and fear of this immense city and accept everything insofar as possible with some calm and determination”.
Members of this disenfranchised community became the subjects of many of Delaney’s greatest New York period paintings. In New York “he painted colourful, engaging canvasses that captured scenes of the urban landscape…his works from that period express, in an American Modernist vein, not only the character of the city, but also his personal vision of equality, love, and respect among all people”.
Delaney established himself as a well known part of the bohemianism of the art scene of the period. His friends included the “poet laureate” of the period, Countee Cullen, artist Georgia O’Keeffe, and writer Henry Miller, among many others. He became the “spiritual father” of the young writer James Baldwin.
Despite the friendships and successes of this period, he remained a rather isolated individual. David Leeming, in his 1998 biography Amazing Grace: a life of Beauford Delaney, presents Delaney as having led a very “compartmentalized” life in New York.
In Greenwich Village, where his studio was, Delaney became part of a gay bohemian circle of mainly white friends; but he was furtive and rarely comfortable with his sexuality. When he traveled to Harlem to visit his African-American friends and colleagues, Delaney made efforts to ensure that they knew little of his other social life in Greenwich Village. He feared that many of his Harlem friends would be uncomfortable or repelled by his homosexuality.
He had “a third life” centered on questions concerning the aesthetics and development of modernism in Europe and the United States; primarily influenced by the ideas of his friends, photographer Alfred Stieglitz and the cubist artist Stuart Davis (painter), and the paintings of the European modernists and their predecessors like Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Van Gogh.
The pressures of being black and gay in a racist and homophobic society would have been difficult enough, but Delaney’s Christian upbringing and “disapproval” of homosexuality, the presence of a family member (his artist brother Joseph) in the New York art scene and the macho abstract expressionists emerging in lower Manhattan’s art scene added to this pressure. So he remained rather isolated as an artist even as he worked in a center of major artistic ferment. A deeply introverted and private person, Delaney formed no lasting romantic relationships.
In 1953, at the age of 52, and just as the center of the art world was shifting to New York, Delaney left New York for Paris. Europe had already attracted many other African-American artists and writers who had found a greater sense of freedom there. Writers Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, William Gardner Smith and Richard Gibson, and artists Harold Cousins, Herbert Gentry and Ed Clark had all preceded him in journeying to Europe. In his journal, Richard Wright described Paris as “a place where one could claim one’s soul.”
Europe became Delaney’s home for the remainder of his life. About his new life and possibilities, Beauford entreated himself to “Keep the faith and trust in so far as possible. Love humility and don’t mind the insinuations that cause sorrow…and loneliness and limitations. We learn self-reliance and to hear the voice of God, too…and how to…not break but bend gently. Learning to love is learning to suffer deeply and with quietness.”
Like Philip Guston and Stuart Davis, Delaney’s art spans several styles, and is connected by robust impasto surfaces and startling colors that give his best pictures a visionary buzz. Starting in the late 1930s, he developed a semiabstract version of American Scene painting (influenced by Davis, a friend).
Then in the early ’40s came a distinctive portrait style. James Baldwin — first his protégé, then his protector — was a frequent subject, as were other Black luminaries, his friends and sometimes his patrons. Starting in the mid-1950s in Paris — where he had moved at Baldwin’s behest — he developed his own brand of allover Abstract Expressionism.
His years in Paris led to a dramatic stylistic shift from the “figurative compositions of New York life to abstract expressionist studies of color and light.”
Delaney’s relationship with abstraction predated the notorious Abstract Expressionist movement, positioning him as a forerunner of one of the most important ideological and stylistic developments in twentieth-century American art. Although he chose not to identify himself with the movement, as the Abstract Expressionists began to gain notoriety in the late 1940s, Delaney’s abstract work increasingly gained attention.
By 1961, heavy drinking had begun to impair Delaney’s often fragile mental and physical health. Periods of lucidity were interrupted by days and sometimes weeks of madness. This pattern continued for the remainder of his life.
He returned briefly to the United States in 1969 to see his family. Dogged by mental illness he believed malicious people came to him at night “and speak unpleasant and vulgar language and threaten malicious treatment…interfering with my health and urgent work…the constant, continuous creation.”
Shortly after his return to Paris in January 1970, Beauford began to display early symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. By the early 1970s, Beauford’s sickness coupled with his financial instability made clear that he could no longer cope with daily life. In the autumn of 1973 his friend, Charles Gordon (Charley) Boggs, wrote to James Baldwin, “Our blessed Beauford is rapidly losing mental control.” His friends tried to care for him but, in 1975, he was hospitalized and then committed to St Anne’s Hospital for the Insane.
Beauford Delaney died in Paris while at St Anne’s on March 26, 1979. Charles Boggs handled Delaney’s will, written on a scrap of paper, in which Delaney had requested that he be buried in Potter’s Field.