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.
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. Today, however, he is hardly a well-known figure in American art. What happened? Surely prejudice had something to do with it: his position as a gay man, an African-American, an expatriate, and a sufferer of mental illness made it difficult for him to fit in wherever he went. But the decision to be an outsider, I believe, was ultimately Delaney’s own. As it did for his friend James Baldwin, exile offered Beauford Delaney the space to work through his sense of being different; it also gave him somewhere to hide from that difference.
From his preacher father came Delaney’s love of spirituals; his mother indulged her children’s artistic inclinations. (Delaney’s brother Joseph also achieved modest success as a painter.) Born in 1901, Delaney grew up in the segregated South of Knoxville, Tennessee. 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. It was there that Delaney encountered the poet Countee Cullen, also a black man struggling with his sexuality, who was studying at Harvard University.
Delaney acknowledged his homosexuality to himself, although he could not fully come to terms with it. He surrounded himself with gay men as friends, but cultivated a reputation as a deeply private person and formed no lasting relationships. How odd to think, then, of Delaney’s first sexual encounter, which he later said took place in the 1920’s in a swan boat in Boston’s Public Garden. (The story, related by biographer David Leeming, is so thoroughly out of character for the prudish Delaney that its accuracy perhaps should be doubted.)
Delaney left Boston for New York in November 1929, an inauspicious move. Although the Harlem Renaissance did not come to a screeching halt with the onset of the Great Depression, economic woes hit black artists and writers particularly hard. Delaney exhibited at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, the center of Harlem’s cultural life. He also found needed work with the government-sponsored WPA mural project at the Harlem Hospital in 1936. But ultimately it was in Greenwich Village, not Harlem, where Delaney found his home. Days were spent as a telephone operator and security guard at the newly opened Whitney Museum downtown. Evenings and free days found Delaney in his cold-water apartment hard at work on pastel portrait sketches or urban street life scenes that showed his fascination with the play of light. He wandered Village streets and sketched in Washington Square Park, where in 1938 a photographer for Life captured Delaney at his easel. The magazine reproduced his image, describing him as a “Negro painter.”
The caption would have made Delaney uncomfortable, not only because the term “Negro painter” narrowed the minds of gallery owners, but because it could shape the imaginations of the Village’s white avant-garde. Such was the case with Delaney’s friend, the author Henry Miller. The two met in 1943; Miller’s profile of Delaney in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1945) did much to publicize Delaney’s paintings, but at the cost of a hopeless misunderstanding of the painter. Miller, in enthusiastic revolt against bourgeois standards of propriety, longed for the unfettered creativity that he believed inhered in all black people, and he went looking for something in Delaney that he couldn’t find in himself: “Beauford was an artist from before birth,” wrote Miller. “He was an artist in the womb, and even before that. He was an artist in Africa, long before the white man began raiding that dark continent for slaves. Africa is the home of the artist, the one continent on this planet which is soul-possessed.” In addition to the racism of this analysis, Miller also entirely missed the psychological pain that defined Delaney’s inner life, finding in the painter “more joy, more bliss, more contentment, more wisdom, more understanding, more compassion, more love than in the members of the great white race.” Miller’s misreading is all the more tragic for overlooking (or erasing) Delaney’s homosexuality: here was Delaney, devoted to opera and classical sculpture, to trappings of high culture that masked his sexual desire and soothed the wounds caused by its repression. Yet in his own blithe quest for sexual liberation, Miller exiled Delaney to the jungled reaches of darkest Africa.
It was an exile Delaney would not accept. He left for Europe in 1953, planning to settle in Rome. Onboard ship, the African-American painter Herbert Gentry, then living in France, urged Delaney to stop off in Paris. “You’ll never feel like an outsider,” Gentry assured him. Delaney would remain in the French capital for the rest of his life. The move once again seems a mistake, drawing him across the Atlantic just as the art world’s center shifted from Paris to New York. Perhaps it was just as well: Delaney never really fit into the macho world of the Abstract Expressionists that was then emerging in lower Manhattan. On the surface, he was rejected because he still persisted in representational painting rather than pure abstraction. Differences in style, however, may not have been the whole story. Art historian Ann Eden Gibson showed in Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (1997) that the white male artists of the New York School believed great art erased the identity of its maker but couldn’t sustain their claims when confronted with art made by people who were different from them. As the painter Lee Krasner was told by her teacher: “This is so good, you would not know it was painted by a woman.” Mix that with Henry Miller’s racist fantasy of the noble savage and Jackson Pollock’s pissing contests, and it’s easy to see why Delaney left New York City behind.
The move may not have been savvy for his career, but it was good for his art. Delaney’s financial and psychological struggles continued, but in Paris his style matured. He moved away from figurative forms toward pure abstraction, and executed dozens of canvases in which thick swaths of color were layered one upon another in a rhythmic pattern that expressed Delaney’s interest in light. He had changed not only his style but his whole outlook: James Baldwin would later note that in Paris “Beauford’s paintings underwent a most striking metamorphosis into freedom.” In addition to his abstract works, he continued to paint portraits, including a sensitive portrait of Baldwin that is among Delaney’s best-known works. Both abstract and representational, the painting conveys emotion through color and also expresses the emotional experience of color itself. That ability was the core of Delaney’s gift as an artist.
For all his accomplishments as a painter, Delaney’s ultimate place in 20th-century cultural history is likely to be as the mentor of James Baldwin. The two first met in New York in 1940, when the teenage Baldwin was struggling to launch his career as a writer. Baldwin spent many nights in Delaney’s unheated downtown loft, reading Delaney drafts of his stories. Delaney, in turn, introduced Baldwin to the sounds of jazz and blues. The two were never lovers—probably to Delaney’s unspoken disappointment. But they remained fiercely close throughout their lives, and Baldwin dedicated three of his books to Beauford Delaney.
Baldwin had left for Paris in 1948, hoping that the city would give him “a refuge from American madness.” The two reconnected soon after Delaney arrived. The painter was then 51 years old; the struggling writer just 29 and already more famous. Neither found much comfort in the crowd of expatriate African-Americans that gathered around writers like Richard Wright and Chester Himes at the Café Tournon. “It’s always the same with homos,” Wright sighed, dismissing the young Baldwin by noting, “Yeah, he can write, but he’s a faggot.” Instead, Baldwin and Delaney found their way to the upstairs room of the Café Flore, where expatriate gay men gathered in the years after World War II.
Although he moved in gay circles, there is nothing expressly gay about Beauford Delaney’s pictures. Almost none includes an image with a homoerotic style or subject matter. There are some sensitive portraits of other gay men: Baldwin, Jean Genet, and others in Delaney’s circle. And there is something almost stereotypically gay to be found in a series of paintings done in homage to his beloved Marian Anderson. But is there more, maybe something a little—as they used to say in the 1950’s—“queer”?
In that sense, Delaney and Baldwin were kindred spirits. Baldwin’s essays from Paris in the 1950’s never discuss homosexuality—even though he was at the time hard at work on his pathbreaking gay novel Giovanni’s Room (1956). But several of the essays that Baldwin published in Notes of a Native Son (1955) consider the place of the exile. The outsider, unable to express himself, seeking a universal language as a mask of difference and a means of communication—such are often the experiences of the American living abroad. These are also the experiences of some gay men in heterosexual society, and it was Baldwin’s gift to express both at the same time. Baldwin chose his words carefully, insisting that he was not an expatriate but an exile, someone who had been rejected by America. Delaney agreed: “One must belong before one may not then belong. I belong here in Paris. I am able to realize myself here. I am no expatriate.”
In the case of Delaney and Baldwin, it can truly be said that in old age, the son is father to the man. Baldwin left Paris in 1957, but he visited Delaney on return trips. Delaney experienced his first major breakdown in Greece in 1960. As he declined irretrievably into mental illness, Baldwin regularly intervened to protect Delaney’s artistic reputation, his finances, and his mental health.
THE MOST RECENT exhibition of Delaney’s paintings, organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, was devoted to the artist’s work in yellow, perhaps the most common color in his palette. It is a color that can signify very different things. Sometimes the yellow in Delaney’s work is the warm, soothing color of Parisian sunlight in the late afternoon, the yellow of vitality and clarity, the color of daffodils and elementary-school classrooms. But Delaney’s pictures can also be bright and frantic, with a vibrancy that nearly sears the viewer’s eye. Sometimes, Delaney reminds us, it hurts to look at the most beautiful things.
Pain was one of the reasons Delaney kept returning to yellow. Yellow was Beauford Delaney’s solace. The color—when combined with his biography—initially calls to mind Van Gogh, another great master of yellow who poured the torture of mental illness into his art, in works that convey his agony as methodically as do charts next to a hospital patient’s bed. That’s not what schizophrenia did to Beauford Delaney. These paintings are not Van Goghs; they are not illustrations of Delaney’s illness. When he was painting, he felt in control of the voices in his head, able to confront the fact that, as Baldwin had written in 1955, “the only real concern of the artist [is]to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.” The disease paralyzed him in his later years, making it impossible for him to concentrate long enough to paint. Madness did not lead Delaney to yellow; it kept him from it.
By the 1970’s, however, Delaney’s mental universe was significantly detached from the world around him. Unable to care for himself, he lost all his money and produced little work. Again, his timing was off: as interest in black artists expanded in the United States, Delaney found himself the subject of renewed attention. (In the academic subfield of African-American art, he remains a canonical figure today.) But his illness was so severe that he may not have really understood that he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1978. By then he had been committed to St. Anne’s Hospital in Paris, where he died in March 1979.
Delaney is difficult to characterize. Late in his life, his old New York acquaintance Georgia O’Keeffe struggled to find the words: “He was a very special person—impossible to define. I think of him as a special experience and always with a feeling that it is fine to know he is living—somewhere—still being his special self—what I do not exactly know, but he is a special kind of thought.” O’Keeffe failed, and even his closest friend James Baldwin acknowledged that no one could truly grasp the artist: “I do not know, nor will any of us ever really know, what kind of strength it was that enabled him to make so dogged and splendid a journey.” Baldwin knew the depths of Delaney’s pain; some of it, he had felt himself. He also knew the joys of creativity, the pleasures of the artist, and the beauty of Parisian light. Delaney’s light, Baldwin noted, “held the power to illuminate, even to redeem and reconcile and heal.” That is the light we are meant to see in Delaney’s shining yellow pictures.
Exhibition: “Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow”
Curated by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta
At the Sert Gallery, Harvard University Art Museums, February 15 to May 4, 2003
Christopher Capozzola is assistant professor of history at MIT and a frequent contributor to this journal.
