Beauford Delaney: Portraits Shining with Inner Light


Art by the deceased American painter Beauford Delaney more than forty years ago, deserves continued attention from a major New York museum. It’s breathtaking that it hasn’t happened yet. At a time when art history, and Black American art in particular, is expanding in all directions, Delaney seems to be hiding in plain sight. His work is one of the major achievements of 20th century American art. New York, his home for 24 years, is where most of its development took place.

Like Philip Guston and Stuart Davis, Delaney’s art spans several styles and is interconnected with solid impasto surfaces and astonishing colors that give his best paintings a visionary air. Beginning in the late 1930s, he developed a semi-abstract version of American Scene painting (influenced by a friend, Davis). Then came a distinctive portrait style in the early 40s. (James Baldwin—first his patroness, then his protector—was a frequent topic, as were other black intellectuals, their friends, and sometimes their patrons.) Beginning in the mid-1950s – in Paris, where he moved on Baldwin’s behest – he thrived. Abstract Expressionism, which is its own brand with everything. With fields of light-filled color in rhythmic brushstrokes, he cured Monet’s lifelong fascination.

In 1978, the Studio Museum in Harlem held a Delaney retrospective—the attention it garnered was fleeting, so it was ahead of its time. Ten years later his work began to resurface, this time in solo and group exhibitions at two New York galleries – first with Philippe Briet and then with Michael Rosenfeld. The last of these is the remarkable Rosenfeld Gallery. “Be Your Fabulous Self: Portraits of Beauford Delaney.”

Born in Knoxville, Tenn., in 1901, Delaney was Black and gay at a time when being in the United States was particularly dangerous. But he was also visibly talented. When Delaney was in his late teens, his first painting was seen by Lloyd Branson, a white Knoxville artist who offered to give him art lessons. In 1923, Branson sent Delaney to Boston with money and promotional letters. Delaney stayed for six years, haunting museums, attending three art schools, and frequently visited the halls of the city’s intelligentsia, given Boston’s long association with the abolition. He arrived in Manhattan in 1929 and became a beloved fixture in Greenwich Village and Harlem, barely grabbing an unheated loft on Greene Street.

The Rosenfeld exhibition presents 25 portraits dated from 1941 (a gorgeous, multicolored, full-length depiction of the young Baldwin nude) to 1972 (a somewhat peculiar portrait of author Jean Genet). However, among these works are seven abstract paintings made from 1958 to 1970. The combination explains how Delaney’s artistic endeavors support each other. So abstraction gave Delaney a new outlet for his love of color and helped portraits achieve a new kind of painterly magnificence.

In the 1940s, before Delaney fully embraced abstraction, his portraits were characterized by solid realism, overloaded with color. This trend is evident in Baldwin’s 1941 nude portrait and Edna Porter’s patterned dress (1943). In 1944’s “Presence (Irene Rose),” the sitter’s hair is brown but also purple, turquoise, and green, and her red-orange dress is apparently augmented by chunky purple stones with gold cuff bracelets with an orange shimmer.

In a 1943 portrait, a handsome young British lieutenant, perhaps a pilot, is supported by speckled blues and pinks. And in a portrait of Baldwin circa 1945-50 in which he appears to be sitting in midair, the background is an almost abstract painting, while the multicolored denim conjures up an almost hallucinatory interpretation of light and shadow. His eyes fixate on ours with an intense, almost otherworldly look that becomes fixed in later portraits. The fact that Delaney’s interpretation has become less naturalistic seems to suit these more concentrated glances. Their stylization, gaining something from the inaction of the Egyptians, adds to the dignity of their subjects.

The earliest Paris painting here is the “Composition Peinture (aka Light Blue to Golden Abstraction)” from circa 1958, suggesting that abstraction was completely captured in a flash of color, suggesting an artist who was happy with nature. You will soon realize that the brushwork in Delaney’s abstractions is freeform; Each surface has different rhythms. Two small abstractions from the 1960s share a light palette of yellow and white, but one is a rough, criss-cross strokes surface, and the other is a soft puddle-blot expanse, almost like sunspots. Each painting feels fresh and experimental—a risky lack of predictability shared by very few of his contemporaries. In this exhibition, Delaney’s abstract techniques first appear in his figurative efforts in his 1962 self-portrait, in which the background as well as the artist’s face, sweater and French beret are pulverized in different color combinations. Each area can be expanded to an abstract painting.

Delaney’s mottled clothes and background also evoke auras, inner light. Whether it’s on the glowing face of Baldwin’s friend, dancer Bernard Hassell, against purple (circa 1963), or in the entire presence of another friend of his from 1963, Ahmed Bioud, a bold, bright yellow becomes his signature color. Abstraction and portrait. Get incredible coherence in a 1967 portrait of Baldwin where the author’s face and shoulders are little more than black outlines with touches of green on a pulsating yellow field.

Delaney’s multi-stage success fits the entire map of 20th-century American art: the Harlem Renaissance, the Stieglitz circle, American Stage painting, and Abstract Expressionism, but these dates still await. David Leeming’s detailed, insightful “Incredible Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney” (1998) provides a reliable basis for further study. Since 1990, museums across the country have been realizing that their collections need Delaney’s paintings and taking action. New York has gone from having one Delaney in a public collection—a gouache given to the Studio Museum in 1984—to 15 held in five different museums. Such acquisitions begin to give Delaney’s work a solid footing in the city’s art consciousness and beyond. But this is just the beginning.

Be Your Wonderful Self: Portraits of Beauford Delaney

By November 13, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 100 11th Avenue, Manhattan, (212) 247-0082; michaelrosenfeldart.com.tr



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