The Brooklyn Rail

In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney is a masterfully curated survey. The exhibition treks the development of Delaney’s work from the late 1920s up through the early ’70s, shortly before the artist passed away in 1979 following several years dogged by mental illness. The show demonstrates how, during the course of five fruitful decades, Delaney produced academic portraits of Black intellectuals like James Baldwin and Bernard Hassell with great verisimilitude, plumbed a unique mode of color field painting marked by flaxen and cerulean crests, and produced urban landscape studies that combine second-generation Cubism’s formalism with Fauvist color. The show is oriented primarily towards Delaney’s mature oeuvre: it does not include works from the artist’s early years in Knoxville, where he studied with Lloyd Branson until 1924, or those produced during his studies in Boston.

The exhibition texts illuminate Delaney’s erudition and involvement with overlapping twentieth-century avant-garde movements, making effective use of journal entries, correspondence, and exhibition catalogues from the New York Public Library’s Beauford Delaney collection and the University of Tennessee’s Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archive. For example, the broadly chronological show includes a letter from Georgia O’Keeffe to Delaney from March 1941, Baldwin’s exhibition essay for Delaney’s 1964 Galerie Lambert show in Paris, Henry Miller’s 1969 homage “to the unforgettable Beauford Delaney,” Delaney’s ballpoint notebook sketches and journal entries, and pages from various exhibition catalogues and flyers. The well-researched wall texts and archival vestiges complement the displayed works, clarifying Delany’s important place within the Harlem Renaissance, Abstract Expressionism, the New York School, and, in the mid-1950s, the bohemian salon scene of Paris’s La Rive Gauche.

The exhibition includes about ninety works on paper and five works on canvas. The earliest is a 1929 charcoal profile of an anonymous Black sportsman, Harlem Athlete, which speaks to Delaney’s early academic style and was exhibited at the artist’s first one-man show, a 1930 exhibition at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. Despite the Drawing Center’s decision not to include any works from Delaney’s “purely figurative” period before 1929, we do find a significant number of pieces from what David Adams Leeming, in his authoritative biography, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney, calls the “transitional portraits of the 1930s,” which prefigure and anticipate Delaney’s abstractions. These works also clarify Delaney’s Boston influences—chiefly his contact with Impressionism. With the help of Lloyd Branson’s letter of recommendation and Boston society contacts like the well-regarded Bryant family (who were acquainted with the African American upper-middle class and associated with the abolitionist and women’s rights movements in Boston), Delaney informally enrolled in several classes at various art institutions. At the Massachusetts Normal Art School, Delaney concentrated on portraiture and academic techniques, honing his drawings by copying antique statues and old master paintings. These were complemented by classes at the South Boston School of Art and the Lowell Institute. Many of the early portraits on view, like Untitled (Portrait of a Man) (ca. 1930), show that Delaney was an adept draftsman with an assured sense of perspective and by no means a “self-taught” or “primitive” painter as many early critics mistakenly claimed. John Singer Sargent’s 1926 memorial exhibition apparently deeply impacted the young Delaney, as did the late Claude Monet’s interest in light fluctuation. Delaney was also influenced by Henri Matisse’s colorism during this period, a fact made evident by Delaney’s 1945 pastel portrait of Baldwin, where the latter’s purple-brown stippled skin is dappled by orange glows and maroon breaks.

The exhibition includes a great number of works from Delaney’s time in New York, where the artist moved in November 1929. Delaney’s early influences were enriched by the writings of Alain Locke, Marcus Garvey, and W.E.B. Du Bois, all of whom Delaney absorbed under the direction of poet and novelist Countee Cullen. Delaney also grew close to Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Claude McKay while frequenting hard bop jazz establishments associated with the Harlem Renaissance, including the Cotton Club, Cairo’s, Small’s Paradise, Connie’s Inn, the Savoy Ballroom, and the Café Society. Works like Beauford’s 1933 portrait of his brother Joseph emerge from the siblings’ time together studying at the Art Students League. While the younger Delaney began painting scenes of workers, hewing towards the regionalist style of his instructor, Thomas Hart Benton, Beauford brought together the principles of Stuart Davis’s second-generation Cubism and John Sloan’s dramatic character studies, as well as printmaker Don Freeman’s light, airy palette. Working from his Greene Street studio, Delaney created expressionistic urban studies like Untitled (Traffic Signals) (1945) and Greene Street (1950), two brilliant, prismatic works. Although the former, an oil on canvas, departs from the “works on paper” theme of the exhibition, it is a welcome deviation. An impasto-cream turquoise skyline is accompanied by flat brick buildings reduced to burgundy parallelograms and ruby oblongs. Drooping street-lamps and incised apartment fire escapes punctuate the champagne-flamingo street and plum sidewalk flanked by an aquamarine manhole cover and a hovering golden chevron. It is one of the strongest works in the show.

One can also espy the influence of Cloyd Boykin’s Primitive African Art Center, where Beauford, Joseph, Ellis Wilson, and Palmer Hayden formed an artist retinue known as “The Saints.” Delaney increasingly began painting variegated urban scenes during this period, positioning a flattened house or quotidian street object as the central nexus of his triangulated perspective. This is the case in Untitled (New York City) (ca. 1948), Central Park (1950), and an untitled pastel piece from 1951, which find Delaney reducing his color palette to fixed complementary unities—saffron is paired with lilac and carmine with scarlet, foreshadowing Delaney’s abstractions of the subsequent decade. There are also several similar works produced during Delaney’s fellowship at the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, including Self-Portrait (Yaddo) (1950) and Yaddo (1950). The latter compresses the glass windows of a greenhouse against mechanical tubes and pipes that twist from a white fire hydrant, the serpentine ducts leading into a series of towering salmon and jade skyscraper faces.

In a journal entry where he reflects on his teaching job at the Adult Education Project in Brooklyn, Delaney conveys his growing interest in “the psychological.” Leeming also notes that during the mid-to-late 1930s, Delaney ardently read Expressionism in Art by Oskar Pfister and Otto Rank’s Art and Artist (1932), prefiguring his action painting-aligned work of the subsequent decades. Many of these abstractions, like Chartres (1954) and Untitled (Abstract Circles) (ca. 1956), were executed in Paris, where Delaney relocated in 1953. In Chartres, Delaney draws from the tinted light that shines through the stained-glass windows of the Notre-Dame and Chartres cathedrals, stacking ovular passages of cobalt, maroon, claret, and amber into a totemic pole of ringlets. After a 1960 psychological collapse, Delaney liberated himself from any figurative anchor and began working with free color and fervid, darting brushstrokes. Kaye Crouch’s 2002 Tennessee Historical Quarterly biography of Delaney recounts that the artist covered the walls of his rue Vercingetorix studio with “white cloth and paper to remove the environmental distractions from his new focus on … paint color and surface.”

In Paris, Delaney rubbed shoulders with abstractionists like Larry Calcagno, furthering Delaney’s foray into free-color lyrical abstraction with a host of untitled, scintillating watercolor and gouache works from the 1960s. These prove that Delaney’s abstraction is of a singular order, making use of Van Gogh-like swirls and bleeding swathes of color, clay pinks erupting from verdant green tufts and hay blonde buffing amber roils. Delaney’s command of pure form demonstrates an intuitive understanding of where light best breaches paint and how to aggregate fractured reams of layered vermillion or midnight-purple without suffocating the lighter palettes underneath. The exhibition ends with several late figure studies and self-portraits from the most tumultuous period of Delaney’s life—one marked by poverty, paranoia, hallucinations, alcoholism, and worsening Alzheimer’s disease. However, the late works betray no lapse in Delaney’s artistic talent. Instead they testify to his renewed interest in African art and sculpture, galvanized by visits with his good friend Abdelghani Ahmed-Bioud, a North African scholar at the Bibliotheque Nationale, to the Musée de l’Homme.

The Drawing Center exhibition is well-researched and comprehensive, demonstrating the gamut of Delaney’s skill and proving his indelible place in modernist art history.