BEAUFORD DELANEY, who died on this date (b: 1901) was an American modernist painter. 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.
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”.
One of Delaney’s works from this period, Can Fire in the Park (oil on canvas, 1946), where a group of men huddle together for warmth and companionship around an open fire, is described by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as a “disturbingly contemporary vignette [which] conveys a legacy of deprivation linked not only to the Depression years after 1929 but also to the longstanding disenfranchisement of black Americans, portrayed here as social outcasts… Despite its sober subject, the scene crackles with energy, the culmination of Delaney’s sharp pure colors, thickly applied paints, and taut, schematic patterning. Abandoning the precise realism of his early academic training, Delaney developed a lyrically expressive style that drew upon his love of musical rhythms and his improvisational use of color.” Works such as Can Fire in the Park “hover between representation and abstraction as that style evolved during the 1940s.”
Delaney found “little corners in the world of the Great Depression that would or could be receptive to his work.” He earned a studio space and place to live through his work at the Whitney as a guard, telephone operator and gallery attendant.
Commendably, 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.
In 1953, 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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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 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 in March 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.
In 1985 James Baldwin described the impact of Delaney on his life, saying he was “the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognized as my Master and I as his Pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow.” Baldwin marveled over Delaney’s ability to emulate such light in his work despite the darkness he was surrounded by for the majority of his life. It is this insight of Delaney’s past, Baldwin believes, that serves as evidence for the true victory Delaney secured. Baldwin admired his keen ability to “lead the inner and the outer eye, directly and inexorably, to a new confrontation with reality.” He further wrote, “Perhaps I should not say, flatly, what I believe – that he is a great painter – among the very greatest; but I do know that great art can only be created out of love, and that no greater lover has ever held a brush.