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Whatever happened to Beauford Delaney? - Philippe Briet Gallery, New York, New York
Art in America, Nov, 1994 by Eleanor Heartney
The life of Beauford Delaney is one of those rare cases where biography seems to dovetail with romantic mythology about the mutability of artistic fortune. Born in 1901 in Knoxville, Tennessee, to a Methodist minister and his wife, Delaney was encouraged by family and friends to pursue an art career despite the double strikes against him as a black man and a southerner. He moved to Boston at age 24 to study art and then on to New York five years later, where his early gainful employment consisted of a job as a bellboy at the Grand Hotel. Persevering in his single-minded devotion to art while moving from cold-water flat to cold-water flat, he gradually caught the eye of some of the most important artistic and literary figures of his day.
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In his New York heyday Delaney counted James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Joseph Stella, Marian Anderson, Georgia O'Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz and Al Hirschfeld among his friends. A move to Paris in 1953 brought him more friends and supporters, including James Jones and Jean Genet. By 1961, however, Delaney's heavy drinking had begun to impair his mental and physical health. His last years were spent in a mental hospital, and in the late '70s, before his death in 1979, his work was nearly auctioned off by the French government to pay delinquent debts.
But even before this dismal end, friends and patrons had tended to view his life in mythic terms. In 1945, Henry Miller wrote of his friend's "African soul" and mused, "He had started from the deep South with absolutely nothing and, after twenty five years of struggle with a hostile world, had emerged superior to the claims of the world."(1) In 1964 James Baldwin echoed these sentiments: "But the darkness of Beauford's beginnings, in Tennessee, many years ago, was a black-blue midnight indeed, opaque and full of sorrow. And I do not know, nor will any of us ever really know, what kind of strength it was that enabled him to make so dogged and splendid a journey."(2)
Even though Delaney's parents were prominent and respected members of Knoxville's black community and the artist's education in Boston included studies at the Massachusetts Normal School, the South Boston School of Art and the Copley Society, with a stint at Harvard University, the tendency then as now was to cast the successful black artist as a self-taught primitive emerging from the depths of unspeakable poverty. From today's perspective, more important questions are: Why is this once well regarded "artist's artist" virtually unknown to the American art public? What happened? Is this another case of an overinflated reputation returning to its true level? Or was Delaney undone by changing fashions which rendered his work unpalatable to succeeding generations? Why did Beauford Delaney so completely disappear from American art history?
This spring, the first New York exhibition of Delaney's work since his death (a retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1978 followed the rescue of his work from the French government, but seems not to have made a dent in his invisibility) made it clear that the fault does not lie with the works themselves. The 47 paintings and works on paper presented at Philippe Briet in "Beauford Delaney: the New York Years (1929-1953)" are a delight. One feels the artist's kinship, at times, to artists like Marsden Hartley, Alice Neel, Stuart Davis and William H. Johnson. The works progress from early, relatively realistic portraits of Harlem's black intelligentsia and bourgeoisie during the early '30s to penetrating, expressionistic portraits of the artist's growing circle of acquaintances.
The 1942 painting Canada Lee is a striking portrait of a powerfully built black man with a face like Picasso's Gertrude Stein set against a brilliant yellow ground. Henry Miller is depicted, in 1944, in heightened colors and nervous, vibrating strokes that bring to mind portraits by Gauguin or van Gogh. Delaney surrounds Miller with an aura of light that suggests his distance from the ordinary run of men.
A series of paintings of Washington Square Park, which Delaney could see from his Greene Street studio, make it clear that he did not view representation and abstraction as antithetical modes. While his portraits retained a link to realism, the park paintings allowed Delaney to indulge his tendencies toward a nearly abstract play of line and color. In his hands, the park's arrangement of concrete and grass is transformed into blocks of bright color separated by thick black outlines that demarcate trees, lamp posts, paths and clusters of park users, including mothers with children, a pair of old men playing chess, livery men, sailors and others. The space is flattened and forms are reduced at times to a cartoonish simplicity, with paint applied in a thick impasto. Delaney's vantage point from his window above the park caused him to tip the scenes slightly upward, further reducing any sense of depth.
The shifting visual rhythms and improvisational quality of the paintings bring to mind the rhythms of jazz, a musical genre which greatly interested Delaney. A number of paintings in the exhibition, like the portrait of composer W.C. Handy, contain explicitly musical subject matter. An untitled scene from a jazz club painted in 1950 offers loosely drawn representations of dancers and musicians playing piano, bass and saxophone. In a different mood, Rehearsal (1952) depicts a gospel choir practicing beneath the gothic arches of brilliantly colored church windows. A 1951 homage to Marian Anderson shows an abstracted street-corner scene dominated by a colorful poster of the singer.
