Art review of Beauford Delaney: Resonance of Form and Vibration of Color at Columbia Global Centers,...

8/17/2019 Art review of Beauford Delaney: Resonance of Form and Vibration of Color at Columbia Global Centers, Reid Hall …

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Beauford Delaney:

Resonance of Form and Vibration of Color

Columbia Global Centers, Reid Hall

4 rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris

February 4th - March 15th, 2016

Published at The Brooklyn Rail

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2016/05/artseen/beauford-delaney-resonance-of-form-and-

vibrationnbspofnbspcolor

“Untitled” (1970) oil on cardboard © Estate of Beauford Delaney, by permission of Derek L.Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator


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Boston, where he worked odd jobs while taking art lessons at institutions such as the

Massachusetts Normal Art School and the Copley Society. In 1929 Delaney moved to Harlem,

just as the Harlem Renaissance was succumbing to the Great Depression. Delaney at the time

took art classes at The Art Students League with Thomas Hart Benton and John Sloan. Among

the relationships he established were friendships with the poet Countee Cullen, and with a

seminal figure in the development of advocacy for African-American art and cultural

advancement in Harlem, Charles Alston. He helped Alston on a Works Progress Administration

mural project at Harlem Hospital while producing pastel portraits sketches of W.E.B. DuBois,

the singer Marian Anderson, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald and others. Turning the tables,

friend Georgia O'Keeffe did Delaney’s portrait as well.

In 1930, Delaney was invited to participate in a show of “Sunday painters” at the Whitney Studio

Galleries (precursor of the Whitney Museum of American Art). He accepted a job as a telephone

operator and security guard there and moved into a living space and studio in the Galleries’

basement. He would later move again, first to Downing Street in Greenwich Village and

subsequently to Greene Street in Soho. It was at 181 Greene Street where he began painting

colorful modernist urban landscapes - not dissimilar from the excellent works of his friend Stuart

Davis, who, like Delaney, had also had been influenced by the paintings of Paul Cézanne, Henri

Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Delaney befriended as well Willem de Kooning, which is intriguing

in that Delaney never felt comfortable within Manhattan’s proto macho Abstract Expressionist

scene. Soho was where Delaney became mentor and long friend to black gay writer James

Baldwin after Delaney fell in love with the teenaged Baldwin, then working on Canal Street,

when Baldwin knocked on his door and found there the inspiration and encouragement to

become a literary artist himself. Baldwin describes this intense initial meeting in the introductory

essay of The Price of a Ticket from 1985, and he dedicated several literary works to him.

Moreover, Soho was where Delaney’s other writer friend, Henry Miller (whose candid writing

about sex eased Delaney’s acceptance of his homosexuality), made him somewhat famous in the

art world with his 1945 praising essay The Amazing and Invariable Beauford Delaney that was

reprinted in Miller’s Air-Conditioned Nightmare. His piece on Delaney is an exception to the

mostly bitter and unsparing criticism here of the American-style materialistic way of life,

American popular culture, and technology in general. This despite its (perhaps unintentionally


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racist) tone of crude racial stereotyping.

But this early relative Soho success did not spare Delaney from the obscurity and poverty that

would plague him to the grave. In 1953 Delaney joined the many painters who came to Paris

during the post-WWII years (such as Joan Mitchell, Ellsworth Kelly, Peter Saul, Sam Francis,

Shirley Jaffe, Norman Bluhm, David Budd, John Levee, John Franklin Koenig, and Joe

Downing) with the encouragement of his painter friend Palmer Hayden. Hayden had already

lived in Paris from 1927 to 1932. Also, James Baldwin, who moved to Paris in 1948, urged

Delaney on. So soon he traveled there by boat with Herbert Gentry and set up his first long-term

residency in the Hôtel des Ecoles on rue Delambre in the 14th arrondissement in Montparnasse.

There he found a place that offered an alternative to the difficulties he had of living in New York

and discovered a way of life less encumbered by racism and homophobic sexual bigotry.

Artistically, Delaney’s painting style(s) matured as he indulged his passionate interest in the

modern art he found in La Rive Gauche galleries and studios, in opera at the Palais Garnier, and

in the Greco-Roman sculpture at the Musée du Louvre. Abandoning the precise realism of his

early academic training, Delaney developed a lyrically expressive style that drew upon his love

of musical rhythm in color. He continued to paint and draw portraits, but also moved away from

representational art towards pure abstraction. His paintings became freer, looser, more expressive

of joy, and more colorfully complex. Yet he continued to faithfully make extensive use of

yellow, a color that he associated with inner universal spirituality.


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“Untitled” (1959) oil on canvas, 144.5x95.5cm © Estate of Beauford Delaney, by permission ofDerek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator


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The best example of this, and one of the best paintings in the show, makes central use of white

and yellow as a symbol for intellect, creativity, happiness and the power of persuasion. It is a

very loosely brushed, lyrical, and musically expressive abstract oil on canvas called “Untitled”

(1959) and it crackles with whiplashes of swirling warm energy mixed in with vines and other

vegetation. I can see in it how Delaney, by exposing himself to the exquisite sun-penetrated

stained glass windows of Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres, considered one of the finest

collections of Gothic windows in the world, felt the soul-touching lyrical power of sun-pierced

yellow taking on a broad sense of Helios communal spirit. I have felt the same thing. “Untitled”

evokes such bright summertime diffraction, with balmy curvilinear swirls passing through wisps

of cool blue air. The whiplashing thick juicy lines also disposed me to feelings of ecstatic

writhing eels almost fin-de-siècle Art Nouveau in mood. It has a quality of heightened

awareness, of focused openness, and expected connectivity that I associate with the spiritually

engaged paintings of Mark Tobey. But with “Untitled” there is a Bebopish jazz to the painting

that sets aspects of the central omphalos swaying, floating, dripping, melting, curling, throbbing,

arching, aching. Such use of a loose swirl of gay, colorful and luminous lyrical expression may

well have been a felt response, as well, to his further exposure to the free flowing lines in the

work of certain European modernists like Hans Hartung. Within this Parisian context, now six

years solid, Delaney may have here too been painting his (sort of) spinal column, rushing with

climaxing pleasure. Certainly energy is dancing and rushing up this Rococo flaming tree with the

passion found in a Willem de Kooning painting of a woman set swinging in a Jean-Honoré

Fragonard. What I want to see in this painting is Delaney externalizing his sense of liberation, of

feeling high on his French reality; where art is a central pillar of society, where blacks are

warmly welcomed in the jazz clubs and literary circles and where he, like other expatriate gay

men, could find like friendship at the Café Flore.

His first solo exhibition in Europe was held in Madrid in 1955 and throughout the late fifties he

also exhibited in Paris, Italy and Germany. But sadly in 1961, Delaney suffered a mental

breakdown brought on by his anxieties over lack of money as exacerbated by his dependence and

spending on alcohol. Delaney’s biographer, David Leeming describes the situation thus: “voices

of despair” had begun to surface along with a “tendency toward disorientation.” Besides the

tensions associated with his past American racial situation and alcoholism, Leeming suggests


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that Delaney kept his personal life in conflicted compartments: “sex with whites, but not with

blacks, sex with temporary acquaintances, not with friends, safe politics with most whites, strong

race identification with blacks. (…) His black friends knew little of his white friends; his gay

friends knew little of his straight ones.” As well, Delaney formed no lasting romantic

relationships. After a severe mental breakdown during a voyage to Greece in 1961, he was

institutionalized for the first time. While he remained a psychiatric outpatient, Delaney produced,

exhibited, and sold numerous paintings, yet he was hospitalized for mental and/or physical

illnesses several more times before finally being committed to the psychiatric facility at Saint

Anne’s Hospital in 1975. Yet I only saw two possible glimmers of these psychic evanescent

woes in the show: one in his entirely weird, (perhaps self-portrait with imaginary thin neck) “The

Eye” (1965) - with its use of blood orange in the eye and distorted head - and in the atypically

stormy brown abstraction “Untitled” from 1961.


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“The Eye” (1965) oil on canvas, 65x54cm © Estate of Beauford Delaney, by permission ofDerek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator

In 1962 he had recovered sufficiently to live on his own again and friends bought him a studio on

the rue Vercingétorix. Though he remained plagued by booze, paranoia and guilt over his

homosexuality, this was a prolific period of abstract painting for him, and he produced fine

energetic works, such as the feathery and fiery “Untitled” (1970). Still Delaney continued to

suffer from hearing “inner voices” and worsening suspicions of mistrust marred his last years.

He refused to give up alcohol and would sometimes ignore doctor’s orders to take his

medication. When Delaney died intestate at Saint Anne’s Hospital on March 26, 1979, he was


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buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery outside Paris (a situation that has since been rectified

by Les Amis de Beauford Delaney). According to Leeming, James Baldwin wished to bury him

in Montparnasse cemetery, but neither Delaney’s family nor Baldwin had the funds to

accomplish this. Yet today there are two plaques commemorating Delaney in Paris; one at the

Hôtel Odessa on rue d'Odessa in the 14th arrondissement where Delaney also stayed in 1953

when recommended by painter Earl Kirkham and several other Americans following some

serious serendipitous merriment at the Dôme Café. The other plaque is at Hôitel Le M, located at

the address of the now defunct restaurant Mille Colonnes where Delaney frequently ate three-

course meals for less than $1.00.

To summarize, the challenge of this show is not in accepting a radical newness in the work’s

form, but in considering it within many contexts simultaneously (as travel abides). The challengeis to resist dropping Delaney into the easy posture that a person’s race and/or sexual preference is

their destiny – and that those contexts are where we are to view the works’ significance. Given

Delaney’s multiple travels and multiplicity of social experiences, his spiritual highs and paranoid

lows, the context for his paintings keeps shifting. There need be consideration of his mobility

and his places of residency within the context of the artistic and economic struggles of African-

Americans, and appreciate how he succeeded to move between different social frames despite

feelings of alienation from racial and sexual discrimination. The paintings fit rather uniquely

within the context of black painters of his generation, where he is more formally daring in terms

of non-figurative abstraction than most like Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Hale

Woodruff, Selma Burke, Richmond Barthé, Norman Lewis and his brother Joseph Delaney. The

work exists also within the context of Modern French painting and art theory, especially that of

art critic Michel Ragon who champion CoBRA, L’Art Informel, Art Brut, and abstract art. Here

Delaney’s abstract work falls in with the lyrically abstract paintings of Tachisme of the 1940s

and 50s. Often considered to be the European equivalent to Abstract Expressionism (although

AE tended to be more aggressively raw than Tachisme), it was part of a much larger postwar

movement known as L’Art Informel (Art Informel) which valued Surrealist-derived intuitive

forms of expression similar to action painting. Yet all this, plus the account of Delaney’s

disadvantaged upbringing, his Harlem artistic roots, his Soho success, his taste in abstract

European modern art, his boho Montparnasse social life, his frequent travels throughout Europe,


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and his warm long friendship with James Baldwin and other American artists living in France do

not adequately sum up or provide a definitive characterization of Delaney and his art. Nor do the

numerous tragedies he suffered later in life with his drinking and debilitating mental illness. If

anything provides a deep thread that runs throughout his life and work, it seems to me to be that

elaborate column of sunny yellow; that pillar of personal passion he did in 1959 in “Untitled.”

My take-away is that that warm swirling shaft of universal inner spirit was the central mast of the

man and his art. Subsequently his work projects a strong and vivid performance of social

innocence where no actual innocence exists. Too many disturbingly taut contemporary vignettes

have been obscuring it. From the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, to barbarous ISIS

beheadings, to the repeated pangs of terrorist attacks, to the undimmed fury around cherishing

the significance of black lives, to the nationwide agonizing response to police killings of

unarmed blacks, events have obscured it. Continual LGBT challenges to equality obscure it.

Still there they are, these paintings of universal inner spirituality, offering us the chance to widen

our focus and consider the warm swirling incontestable fundamentals of a person.

Within the context of atmospheric America, Delaney, even after bearing the brunt of selective

enforcement of the law and social rejections, paints the many moving parts of flight from racism

and homophobia. In that sense, the mounting heat of the work helps us break with cold

essentialist and reductionist-based opinions about each other, and to visualize all the innocent

visible and invisible interactions that occur between and within our habitual perceptual

modalities.

Joseph Nechvatal


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Art review of Beauford Delaney: Resonance of Form and Vibration of Color at Columbia Global Centers,...

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