Remembering African-American Artist Beauford Delaney: Restoring the Delaney Family Home in Knoxville, TN

Beauford Delaney, exhibit honoring the friendship of
"Delaney and James Baldwin," at
 Knoxville Museum of Arts, February-May 2020

Beauford Delaney, "Gathering Light," at Knoxville Museum of Art.

 

The restoration of the Delaney Home is underway in Knoxville. Organized by the Beck Cultural Exchange Center, the primary repository for the history and culture of East Tennessee, the restoration of the Delaney Home (above) will be undertaken by BarberMcMurry Architects of Knoxville. Yellow is an appropriate color for Beauford, his "signature color" it has been called. He used yellow for so many of his paintings, his portraits and in his more abstract art in the late 1950s to 60s. I found it fascinating.

It's always wonderful when the ancestral homes of talented people who have been hidden from history are restored. It's happening in Knoxville, Tennessee, with the restoration of the Delaney Family home, paying homage to Beauford Delaney, African-American painter and mentor to James Baldwin whose legacy was neglected for a long time after his death in Paris in 1979. Beauford's brother Joseph was also an internationally known artist. East Tennessee I learned, during my dissertation research, had more anti-slavery sentiment than Memphis and West Tennessee, where slavery and plantation life flourished. It is honoring its past. 

Beauford Delaney was born in Knoxville, his father a Methodist minister and his mother a former slave determined to educate her children in freedom, an education she never had. Beauford's early talent was recognized by a local white artist, Lloyd Branson, who encouraged him to go to Boston to pursue his education and to take art lessons. 

After a solid education in the arts, Beauford  moved to New York during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance. He established a solid reputation as a young painter, but he struggled to survive financially. In 1953 he moved to Paris, settling in the Montparnasse district in the Left Bank, an artist colony of international renown that enveloped African-American artists. There he became a close friend and mentor to writer James Baldwin, a friendship that lasted until his death.  Delaney, like Baldwin "relished a sense of freedom as a gay Black man that he did not have in the United States."  Richard Wright, the writer, described Paris as "a place where one could claim one's soul."  

Delaney, James Baldwin,
one of many portraits.

In Paris, Delaney moved toward abstraction. He also painted many portraits of James Baldwin, whose wonderful friendship overtime is a story in itself. The Studio Museum in Harlem had a major retrospective of his work in 1978. A year later the Knoxville Museum of Art acquired several Beauford Delaney paintings for an exhibition, and it is now the major repository of his work. 

Composition 16, at MOMA

"While Paris had in some sense liberated Delaney, there were sorrows he could not escape," a MOMA curator noted. “There always seems to be the shadow,” Delaney wrote to a benefactor, “which follows the light.” Although he was referring to the financial difficulties that plagued him throughout his career, the artist could also have been talking about his struggles with depression and mental illness, which eventually led to his living in a mental hospital at the end of his life. MOMA noted that while Delaney was a mentor to Baldwin during the author’s early years, "Baldwin later became Delaney’s protector, assisting him financially and emotionally."

For an introduction to an exhibition in Paris in 1964 Baldwin wrote, “Perhaps I am so struck by the light in Beauford’s paintings because he comes from darkness—as I do, as, in fact, we all do.” 

 "The vibrant luminosity of Composition 16 is but one example of Delaney’s lifelong quest to find light in that darkness." (MOMA.org on Delaney). 

It is wonderful that Beauford Delaney, a neglected artist for so long, is coming into the light of public awareness and appreciation, reborn in his hometown of Knoxville with the restoration of his childhood home.  Among art patrons and collectors, he is becoming  highly praised and his works highly valued.  

Most of all,  I was taken by Beauford's talent and by James Baldwin's compassion for his friend, his loyalty to an artist who "came from darkness." I was enamoured with Beauford's use of yellow, too, a contrast to the turmoil of his inner life, a color to lighten his burdens and doubts, illuminating his striving to find hope in spite of himself.  A yellow house that inhabits Beauford's soul is a perfect tribute.

Beauford Delaney, "Jazz Quartet." Could that be Ella Fitzgerald at the piano?
It was the Harlem Renaissance and then the post-war New York energy 
when Harlem remained the center of Black cultural life. 

Delaney, "Oh Freedom," a paeon to the Harlem Renaissance.  I love
his paintings from this period.  

Quess what? This is a portrait of
Beauford Delaney by Georgia
O'Keeffe, in New York, 1943. Yes, it's
an O'Keeffe. I didn't know she
did portraits. Loved discovering this!

Sources: 

1. https://www.culturetype.com/2018/02/10/knoxville-museum-of-art-acquires-of-12-beauford-delaney-works-plans-major-exhibition-in-2019/

2. https://lesamisdebeauforddelaney.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-delaney-museum-at-beck.html?

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mz2cU5gVfY8

4. https://knoxvillehistoryproject.org/2020/02/26/beauford-delaney-in-knoxville

5. Beauford Delaney, wikipedia 

6. https://www.moma.org/artists/40994, "Beauford Delaney, American, 1901-1979." I like this description of Composition 16:  

“Have been working and living with the many people who make up Beauford,” Beauford Delaney wrote to his great friend James Baldwin in September 1954, “and trying to merge them into some sense of composition and a workable form of painting.” Composition 16, a modestly sized work on canvas composed of swirling...strokes of yellow, red, orange, ocher, pale green, and blue paint, some squeezed directly from the tube, is a vivid example of Delaney’s quest to unite disparate aspects of his interior life and artistic practice while keeping a promise to continue “doing all that is possible with paint.” With its suggestion of ground, sun, sky...Composition 16 fuses landscape and abstraction, depicting light and color as ecstatic matter. The color yellow, scumbled liberally over the surface of the painting as a unifying element and predominating in many of Delaney’s abstract and figurative works from the period, seems to have held a particular fascination for the artist. Philosopher Rudolf Steiner wrote, “If yellow is to be painted—do not only apply yellow, but live in the colour itself,” and canvases such as Composition 16, like a yellow-hued Self-Portrait from 1962 and the yellow-walled interiors in St. Paul de Vence from 1972, show the artist embracing a Steiner-like dictate."

Beauford Delaney, Ella Fitzgerald, "Isn't she beautiful."
Basking in yellow paint, like "Composition 16." 

More on Beauford's use of Yellow:

"Delaney’s most celebrated paintings date to the late 1950s and 1960s. Characterized by fluid brush strokes, these fully abstracted works are explorations of saturated color and strong texture. His signature use of yellow—which he described as “the color of his sacred light” and representational of a “higher power”—reveals a joy that seems to contradict his deteriorating personal circumstances while illuminating a resolve to resist an inner darkness. In 1963, he wrote these hopeful lines to his friend, the author Henry Miller: “I pray for the courage to keep struggling to express in color the substance of what life is directing. The need in the world for beauty, harmony, good confidence, brotherhood, sunlight, music, humanity...was never so urgent. The creative life is holy.”  https://thejohnsoncollection.org/beauford-delaney/  This site also has a brief bio of Beauford's brother Joseph.