Photo Pest: Beauford Delaney

Thursday, November 11, 2021

Beauford Delaney

Somebody needs to make a woke movie about Beauford Delaney who endured the double whammy of racism and homophobia. I first became aware of this under appreciated artist thanks to Gay Gotham at the Museum of the City of New York.

Self Portrait (1962)

That exhibit featured one of his many portraits of James Baldwin. A generation younger, but also Black and gay, Baldwin thought of Delaney as his "spiritual father." In 1985, Baldwin wrote [he was]

the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognised as my Master and I as his Pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow.

Delaney, born in 1901 to a religious family in Tennessee, lived deeply in the closet, although you wouldn't know it from this portrait of Baldwin, a masterpiece of homoerotic art IMHO.

Dark Rapture (James Baldwin) (ca 1941)

After formal training and some political consciousness raising in Boston, Delaney moved to New York City during the Harlem Renaissance. But the geographical proximity of a brother, coupled with fear that other Black artists wouldn't approve of his homosexuality narrowed his social world to the whiter world of Greenwich Village. In 1953, just as New York was becoming the center of the art world, Delaney migrated to Paris abandoning most of his paintings he hadn't given away to friends. His new bohemian life gave him more freedom, if not more recognition or contentment. Alcoholism and Alzheimer's disease eventually killed him. Penniless, Delaney was buried in an unmarked grave in 1979.