Beaufort delaney biography template
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In 1924, when Delaney was sixteen, he moved to Boston and remained there for five years. The mix of streetlights, moonlight, and the can fire produce waves and puddles of light shown in yellow, purple, and blue. His black friends knew little of his white friends; his gay friends knew little of his straight ones.'' Those compartments ''gradually became voices that argued with each other and taunted their host.''
While socially Delaney's life was bifurcated, his art was similarly difficult to categorize.
In this Untitled painting we see thick spirals and eddies of white and yellow paint enmeshed with strokes of blue and pink. Indistinct, raceless, Delaney's street people strike an ironically poignant note for a contemporary audience while also recalling the tradition of can fires among the urban poor and homeless.
Regenia A. Perry Free within Ourselves: African-American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in Association with Pomegranate Art Books, 1992)
His thickly impastoed canvases celebrated the city landscape and the people who inhabited it.
Late Period
By the 1950s, Delaney was increasingly battling his inner demons. He was noticed by the elderly Impressionist Lloyd Branson, Knoxville's most successful artist. On one hand, he mixed with flamboyant and sexually free Greenwich Village personalities including lifelong friend Henry Miller and Georgia O'Keeffe, as well as gallery owner Darthea Speyer.
In this portrait, the intimacy between the two men is obvious. Delaney continued to develop his abstract expressionist style between 1950 and 1951, when he received a fellowship to the Yaddo Art Colony near Saratoga Springs, New York. Greene Street became a symbol to Delaney as Mont St. Victoire had been to Paul Cézanne.
During the early 1950s, Delaney's paintings became progressively nonrepresentational.
Although he claimed to have been largely self-taught, Delaney attended classes at the Massachusetts Normal Art School and the South Boston School of Art, and enrolled in evening classes at the Copley Society. It is described by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as a "disturbingly contemporary vignette [which] conveys a legacy of deprivation linked not only to the Depression years after 1929 but also to the longstanding disenfranchisement of black Americans, portrayed here as social outcasts...." Delaney's combined sense of celebration and melancholy in his portrayals of the African American community contribute a profound statement to the Harlem Renaissance.
Oil on canvas - Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC
1946
Jazz Quartet
Delaney's love of musical rhythms is on full demonstration in his 1946 painting Jazz Quartet.
His clothes are richly colored and soft, and his figure is surrounded by abstract blocks of soft pastel colors, radiating out from the man and giving the impression that Baldwin literally radiates warm light.
Letter writing became an important source of comfort and communication for Delaney, in an almost spiritual manner. There, intimate portraits of a neglected but proud black community with gorgeous, swirling, vivid colors certainly owe a debt to this vastly undervalued artist.
Influences and Connections
Influences on Artist
Influenced by Artist
Henry Miller
James Baldwin
Open Influences
Close Influences
Useful Resources on Beauford Delaney
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Books
The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page.
His use of the color yellow is not solely about an obsession with light, but also an opportunity to look into the internal landscape of a person, and he takes full advantage of this opportunity with Ella." Delaney's portraits always strived to capture the inner essence of his sitters, their "inner light." This portrait of Ella Fitzgerald is a celebration of her beautiful voice and spirit of creativity, freedom, expression; everything that Delaney as a fellow African American artist in Paris hoped to find.
He began to paint portraits and scenes of the cultural melting pot of Harlem, feeling an affinity with the minorities that gathered there.
Delaney supported himself with odd jobs, including a hotel bell hop and art teacher. Never a word about his misfortunes." James Baldwin wrote, "He is a great painter, among the very greatest" and that he was "the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist.
Describing their initial 1940 meeting, Baldwin recounted, "A short brown man came to the door and looked at me.