Beauford Delaney

Born in 1901, Beauford Delaney, an expatriate African-American painter, spent his childhood and teen years in Knoxville, Tennessee. He studied at the Massachusetts Normal School in Boston, in 1924, moving to Harlem and other New York City locations in 1929. In 1953, he went permanently to live in France, mainly Paris. He died there on March 25, 1979.

Among many intellectuals Delaney knew as a kindred soul, friend and mentor, were James Baldwin, then a young author, who became a lifelong friend. Writer Henry Miller introduced many people to Delaney in his essay The Amazing and Invariable Beauford Delaney.

Early critics of Delaney's paintings lauded his wit and eye, yet tended to pigeon-hole him as a "Negro artist." A natural draughtsman, he went beyond the rendering of likeness to the search for feelings, states of mind and being, emotional temperatures. He worked in realistic and abstract modes, both characterized by Expressionist freedom of drawing, paint-handling and composition.

Delaney's love of art and life carried him through many economic and spiritual crises. He suffered from alcoholism and its attendant problems. In the early 1960s, he was diagnosed by one psychiatrist as having paranoid delusions aggravated by alcohol. Regardless of this, Delaney was clearly a very sensitive person stressed by slow art sales, the departure of friends, and his own poor nutritional habits. These precipitated depression, followed by heavy drinking.

Charley Boggs, a long-time friend of Delaney's, helped with financial support, lodging and friendship during times that were some of the least graceful in Delaney's life -- when his mind and body were falling apart.

Some exhibition venues of Beauford Delaney's work include the Vendome Gallery, Roko Gallery and Artists' Gallery, New York City, in the 1940s; Gallerie Paul Fachetti, 1960; and Black Master, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1978.

David Leeming, who knew Beauford Delaney, has written a recent biography of the artist, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney, Oxford University Press, 1998. Some reviews include the following:

Beauford Delaney was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and studied with a local artist before moving to Boston in 1923. While in Boston, Beauford Delaney studied art at the Massachusetts Normal School, the Copley Society and the South Boston School of Art and spent time admiring the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

In 1929, Delaney moved to New York City and studied for a brief time at the Arts Students League with John Sloan and Thomas Hart Benton. His paintings of the 1940s and early 1950s consist largely of portraits, modernist interiors and street scenes executed in impasto with broad areas of vibrant colors. Delaney's interest in the arts also included poetry and jazz, and he formed close friendships with writers such as James Baldwin and Henry Miller, and other artists, including Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keefe, and Al Hirshfeld.

Although he maintained relationships with the artists of 306 and was a member of the Harlem Artists Guild, Delaney was consumed by his own artistic vision and was firmly connected to the Greenwich Village artistic community. In 1953, Beauford Delaney left New York and traveled to Europe, settling in Paris. Feeling a new sense of freedom from racial and sexual biases, Delaney focused on creating lyrical, colorful non-objective abstractions. These paintings, consisting of elaborate and fluid swirls of paint applied in luminous hues, are pure and simplified expressions of light.

In 1978, The Studio Museum in Harlem organized his first major retrospective exhibition, and in 1979, Delaney died in Paris while hospitalized for mental illness.