Beauford Delaney
Lifelong companion of Baldwin, Bernard Hassell was among Beauford’s closest friends, caring for the artist during his illness and later assigned a trustee of Beauford’s affairs after he was committed to hospital in 1975. Hassel, too, was an American emigre living in Paris, where he established himself as a dancer and choreographer with the Folies-Bergère. He would become a recurring likeness in Beauford’s portraits from the mid-fifties onwards, each canvas suffused with luminous shades of yellow. Though the artist pursued increasingly abstract compositions, he returned often to loose figuration, if only to paint compelling portraits of his more intimate acquaintances. “Delaney’s portraiture during the 1960s, although often regarded as a departure from the artist’s abstract explorations of light, was actually an extension of the same,” curator Patricia Sue Canterbury writes. The distinction between the purely formal and the figurative became less apparent in his portraits as time progressed – the sitters subsumed into the surrounding atmosphere of painted luminescence.
b.1901, Knoxville; d.1979, Paris
A close confidant of the writer James Baldwin and friend of fellow painter Willem de Kooning, Beauford Delaney was uniquely positioned between the Harlem Renaissance and the rise of SoHo’s AbEx movement. He earned little lasting recognition in the States, however, and later followed Baldwin to Paris in 1953 at the encouragement of artist Palmer Hayden. In overview, Beauford Delaney’s shifting style finds no easy category; his abstractions closer in sensibility to Tachism than Abstract Expressionism, his figurative works aligned only loosely with l’Art Informel. There is a lyrical seduction to his compositions, the paint applied thickly and feelingly. He pursued no singular objective or ideal, was concerned with neither verisimilitude nor formalism. Only the colour yellow would prove a lasting preoccupation; his paintings “studies in light revealed.” To Delaney, such light extended beyond the seen to the felt, was at once real and symbolic; a supplication of hope against the spreading shadows. “I learned about light from Beauford Delaney” – Baldwin wrote of the artist in a 1964 catalogue essay for Galerie Lambert –
the light contained in every thing, in every surface, in every face. Many years ago in poverty and uncertainty, Beauford and I would walk together through the streets of New York City. He was then, and is now, working all the time, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he is seeing all the time; and the reality of his seeing caused me to begin to see.
Delaney’s yellow, however, could not keep out the dark. He would spend the last decade of his life plagued by paranoia, alcoholism, and Alzheimer’s. “There always seems to be the shadow,” the painter wrote to a benefactor, “which follows the light.” Delaney died an inpatient at Sainte Anne’s Hospital in Paris; his body consigned to an unmarked pauper’s grave.