Artist

Beauford Delaney

born Knoxville, TN 1901-died Paris, France 1979
Born
Knoxville, Tennessee, United States
Died
Paris, France
Active in
  • New York, New York, United States
Biography

In 1929 aspirations and the energy of the Harlem Renaissance drew Beauford Delaney—trained in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Boston—to New York. By the mid 1940s he had forged close friendships with novelists Henry Miller and James Baldwin and gained wide recognition for his pastel portraits of well-known African Americans such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Duke Ellington. As comfortable with artists as with his neighbors in Harlem or Greenwich Village, Delaney conveyed his abiding love of mankind in paintings and drawings that ranged from the representational to the abstract.

As for many artists of his generation, New York's urban scene attracted Delaney's eye. In Can Fire in the Park, [SAAM 1989.23] anonymous men gather near a source of heat, light, and camaraderie. This disturbingly contemporary vignette 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. At the lower left and upper right, objects that suggest street signs also function as arrows symbolically pointing the way up and out of desolation. Despite its sober subject,the scene crackles with energy, the culmination of Delaney's sharp pure colors, thickly applied paints, and taut, schematic patterning. Abandoning the precise realism of his early academic training, Delaney developed a lyrically expressive style that drew upon his love of musical rhythms and his improvisational use of color. Works such as Can Fire in the Park hover between representation and abstraction as that style evolved during the 1940s.

Neither early success nor gracious spirit spared Delaney from the obscurity and poverty that plagued him, particularly after he moved to Paris in 1953. In 1978—a year before Delaney died in a French asylum—the Studio Museum in Harlem initiated its Black Master series with a retrospective of his work, the first attempt to restore his forty-year career to public light.

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan African-American Art: 19th and 20th-Century Selections (brochure. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art)

Works by this artist (45 items)

Barbara Bosworth, Untitled, from the series The Bitterroot River, 1995-1997, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Haluk and Elisa Soykan, 2008.2.38, © 1995-1997, Barbara Bosworth
Untitled, from the series The Bitterroot River
Date1995-1997
gelatin silver print
Not on view
Barbara Bosworth, Untitled, from the series The Bitterroot River, 1995-1997, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Haluk and Elisa Soykan, 2008.2.35, © 1995-1997, Barbara Bosworth
Untitled, from the series The Bitterroot River
Date1995-1997
gelatin silver print
Not on view

Related Books

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African American Masters: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
African American Masters focuses on black artists whose efforts in the twentieth century demonstrate their command of mainstream traditions as well as the open assertion and exploration of their dual heritage. Many—like Sargent Johnson, Lois Mailou Jones, James Porter, and William H. Johnson—responded in the 1930s and 1940s to Alain Locke's call for an art of the “New Negro” and explored the social and narrative aspects of African or African American sources. Others—Henry Ossawa Tanner, Beauford Delaney, and Norman Lewis—embraced broader themes or the modernist challenges of form and color. Contemporary artists—from Betye Saar and Mel Edwards to Renée Stout and Whitfield Lovell—have mined sources as varied as the autobiographical and the international. Horace Pippin and Purvis Young, as self-taught artists, tapped the spiritual and social underpinnings of their communities. Portraits and documentary images have dominated the subject matter of modern black photographers. James VanDerZee and Roland Freeman epitomize those photographers who have chosen the people and environment of their own neighborhoods as their subjects. Others, foremost among them Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks, have sought out communities or traditions of the larger African American society.