This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born in 1901, Beauford Delaney, an expatriate African-American painter,
spent his childhood and teen years in Knoxville, Tennessee. He
studied at the Massachusetts Normal School in Boston, in 1924, moving
to Harlem and other New York City locations in 1929. In 1953, he
went permanently to live in France, mainly Paris. He died there
on March 25, 1979.
Among many intellectuals Delaney knew as a
kindred soul, friend and mentor, were James Baldwin, then a young
author, who became a lifelong friend. Writer Henry Miller introduced
many people to Delaney in his essay The Amazing and Invariable Beauford Delaney.
Early
critics of Delaney's paintings lauded his wit and eye, yet tended to
pigeon-hole him as a "Negro artist." A natural draughtsman, he
went beyond the rendering of likeness to the search for feelings,
states of mind and being, emotional temperatures. He worked in
realistic and abstract modes, both characterized by Expressionist
freedom of drawing, paint-handling and composition.
Delaney's
love of art and life carried him through many economic and spiritual
crises. He suffered from alcoholism and its attendant problems.
In the early 1960s, he was diagnosed by one psychiatrist as having
paranoid delusions aggravated by alcohol. Regardless of this, Delaney
was clearly a very sensitive person stressed by slow art sales, the
departure of friends, and his own poor nutritional habits. These
precipitated depression, followed by heavy drinking.
Charley Boggs, a long-time friend of Delaney's, helped with
financial support, lodging and friendship during times that were some
of the least graceful in Delaney's life -- when his mind and body were
falling apart.
Some exhibition venues of Beauford Delaney's
work include the Vendome Gallery, Roko Gallery and Artists' Gallery,
New York City, in the 1940s; Gallerie Paul Fachetti, 1960; and Black
Master, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1978.
David Leeming, who knew Beauford Delaney, has written a recent biography of the artist, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney, Oxford University Press, 1998. Some reviews include the following:
Sources include:
http://www.artgallery.umd.edu/driskell/exhibition/artists/bio.htm
http://www.unhooked.com/booktalk/beauford_delaney.htm
|
Biography from Vered Gallery:
| 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.
In 1978, The Studio Museum in Harlem organized his first major retrospective exhibition, and in 1979, Delaney died in Paris while hospitalized for mental illness.
Some exhibitions of Beauford Delaney's work include the Vendome Gallery, Roko Gallery and Artists' Gallery, New York City, in the 1940s; Gallerie Paul Fachetti, 1960; and Black Master, Studio Museum in Harlem, 1978.
David Leeming, who knew Beauford Delaney, has written a recent biography of the artist entitled Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney, Oxford University Press, 1998.
Works by Delaney are in the following public collections, among others: Art Institute of Chicago; Beck Cultural Exchange; Greenville County Museum; Minneapolis Institute of the Arts; National Gallery of Art; Smithsonian Museum of American Art; Baltimore Museum of Arts; Newark Museum of Art and University of Michigan Museum of Art. |
Biography from Michael Rosenfeld Gallery:
|  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.
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.
In 1978, The Studio Museum in Harlem organized his first major
retrospective exhibition, and in 1979, Delaney died in Paris while
hospitalized for mental illness. |
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Beauford Delaney is also mentioned in these AskART essays:
Black American Artists
|