SPECULATIVE LIGHT
The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin
Edited by Amy J. Elias
Duke Univ. Press. 332 pages, $35.
WHEN JAMES BALDWIN met painter Beauford Delaney in 1940, he was sixteen, Delaney 39. Advised by one of his friends to visit the artist in his Greenwich Village apartment, Baldwin later recalled that when the door opened, he encountered “a short round brown man” with “the most extraordinary eyes I’d ever seen.” Delaney was for Baldwin “the first living, walking proof … that a Black man could be an artist.”
Over the next 38 years, Delaney became Baldwin’s “spiritual father”: “I learned about light from Beauford Delaney, the light contained in everything, in every surface, in every face.” The artist painted the first of his many portraits of Baldwin in 1942, a nude he titled Dark Rapture. David Leeming, a biographer of both men, believes that Delaney was in love with Baldwin from the beginning, though there’s no record of their being physical. Three of Delaney’s later portraits graced the covers of Penguin Random House’s 2024 Baldwin Centennial reissues of Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and If Beale Street Could Talk.
Amy J. Elias, a professor and director of the Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is the editor of Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin. She considers Delaney to be “an artistic genius, and [a]model of perseverance as a southern, gay, Black man.” Professor Monika Gehlawat comments that the pair “formed a kind of kinship in exile, a family of their own” that helped them to navigate their shared identity as queer Black American artists.
Delaney was born into a prominent African-American family in Knoxville in 1901. Both he and his younger brother became painters, showing an interest in art from a young age. Delaney’s first works were noticed by an older white Knoxville artist who assisted in sending him to Boston to study. There, he took classes informally and modeled, unable to enroll in the segregated art schools. Through a range of connections, Delaney was introduced both to wealthy, socially progressive white people and to Black civil rights figures. Moving to New York City just as the Great Depression was beginning in 1929, Delaney soon became one of the few Black “Greenwich Village Bohemians.” He befriended many prominent figures of the time, including Georgia O’Keeffe and her lover Alfred Stieglitz, writer Henry Miller, and the poet Countee Cullen, who later taught French to a high schooler named James Baldwin.
In 1953, Delaney left for Paris, where his painting shifted from portraits and figurative compositions to abstract studies of color and light. Although his work was shown at numerous group and one-man shows in Europe, Delaney always lived in extreme poverty, giving away what little money he had to friends and those less fortunate. He drank heavily and suffered from periods of mental instability and paranoia for most of his life, hearing threatening and berating voices. Numerous close friends tried to care for him, including Baldwin, who had the artist live with him for a time at his home in St. Paul de Vence. As his condition deteriorated, in 1971 Delany was first hospitalized, then committed to St. Anne’s Hospital for the Insane outside Paris. He died there in 1979.
Elias commissioned essays from nineteen artists, critics, writers, and scholars for Speculative Light, including Baldwin biographers Nicholas Boggs, Robert Reid-Pharr, Magdalena Zaborowska, and Leeming. Essays explore the ways in which both men’s art and lives were shaped by their friendship, through topics that from masculinity, queerness, blackness, and Americanness to the relationship between jazz, painting, and writing. Hilton Als imagines Delaney’s thoughts before first meeting the teenage Baldwin. Poet Ed Pavlić calls upon archival letters from Baldwin to his brother David that illuminate the conflict of being both a public figure and a private person.
Much of the focus in the first sections of Speculative Light is on how the artist influenced the writer’s work. Elias views both men employing “synesthetic aesthetics” in their work: “multisensory experiments whereby one art form provokes insights into, or even is redefined as, another art form—to help audiences ‘hear’ a painting or ‘see’ music, for example.” For Columbia professor Robert G. O’Meally, Baldwin’s writing in “Sonny’s Blues,” a short story, “visualizes on the page: picturing characters and scenes in words with deliberate use of color, texture, and layers; enlisting strategies most closely associated with painting.” This story appears in a collection dedicated to Delaney, 1965’s Going to Meet the Man.
Baldwin often spoke of how Delaney taught him “nothing less than how to see.” In a 1984 interview, he recalled “walking the streets of Greenwich Village with Delaney, who pointed down to an oily puddle, saying only, ‘Look.’ Baldwin realized he could see all the lights and colors of the city in the puddle’s iridescence, and in that moment, learned to trust his sight.” Critic D. Quentin Miller finds versions of Delaney’s life story recurring throughout Baldwin’s fiction as “the model of the victim-artist who takes on the cultural burden of his society and suffers in order to show us the value of the light that can ‘redeem and reconcile and heal.’” For Miller and Indiana University professor Walton Muyumba, Delaney’s influence is strongest in some of Baldwin’s more formally experimental and often overlooked “mixed form” works: the novel If Beale Street Could Talk, the essay-memoir hybrids No Name in the Street and The Devil Finds Work, and his recently rediscovered children’s book Little Man, Little Man.
Section Three of Speculative Light turns to Delaney’s paintings and the “contradiction” between his abstract work and his more realistic portraits. A cultural theorist and poet who frequently uses music to advance his work, Fred Moten hails the artist as “the greatest painter of and with yellow in the history of the world,” considering the abstract representations of the jazz he loved. Tyler T. Schmidt, author of Desegregating Desire: Race and Sexuality in Cold War American Literature, explores 1971’s Self-Portrait in a Paris Bath House. The painting is a surprising work, as Delaney was generally furtive and uncomfortable with his sexuality (while also desiring a partner beyond the occasional pick-up). According to Leeming, Delaney compartmentalized his personal life, with one group of his friends knowing nothing about the other. In this late self-portrait, however: “Delaney sits in the bathhouse not as a peeping lech but as an adorned figure perhaps receiving guests in an open-arched room. … Delaney’s bathhouse is a temple to restoration and eroticism.”
The final section of the book explores how Baldwin and Delaney have shaped the work of current artists and writers. Describing Delaney’s art in a letter to Harry Belafonte, Baldwin’s assessment also applies to the writer himself: “He brings great light out of the terrible darkness of his journey, and makes his journey, and his endeavors, and his triumph, ours.”
Greatly enhanced by 32 color plates of Delaney’s paintings, Speculative Light’s scholarly investigations into the Baldwin-Delaney relationship are easily accessible to the general reader. The book is valuable to anyone curious about the interplay between different genres of writing (fiction vs. nonfiction) or styles of painting (abstraction vs. realism), as well as the cross-pollination between different forms of artistic expression.
Reginald Harris is a writer and poet based in Brooklyn.
