BEAUFORD DELANEY (1901-1979)

BEAUFORD DELANEY died in a Parisian mental hospital in 1979, alone and impoverished, tortured by alcoholism and schizophrenia.  At the time, his closest friend, the author James Baldwin, told people that Delaney's struggle to live as a black man, a gay man, and an artist had simply proved too much.  A recent exhibition of Beauford Delaney's work at the Sert Gallery of the Harvard University Art Museums, however, shows the painter successfully reconciling race, sexuality, and exile, and doing so with a passion for experimentation; a spectacularly successful passion.

For a time, Delaney was a minor celebrity in the expatriate community of postwar Paris, a friend of Colette and Henry Miller, of Jean Genet and James Jones.  In those same years, between 1953 and the mid-1960's, he created a remarkable body of work using vibrant color to translate the unique light of Paris into the language of Abstract Expressionism.  Exile offered Beauford Delaney the space to work through his sense of being different; it also gave him somewhere to hide from that difference.  His first art teacher convinced Delaney to strike out for Boston in 1924.  Hardly the center of the early 20th-century art world, Boston was nonetheless a fine place for Delaney to study painting and sketch the Old Masters' works in museums.  African-American cultural life in Boston was then in the midst of a flowering that has since been overshadowed by the Harlem Renaissance.

Today, Delaney is regarded as a painter of great lyricism, both a true expressionist and colorist of major accomplishment.

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.   He formed a life centered around questions concerning the aesthetics and development of modernism in Europe and the United States; primarily influenced by the ideas of his friends the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and the cubist artist Stuart Davis (painter), and the paintings of the European modernists and their predecessors like Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and Van Gogh.

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