More Beau

They say a rising tide lifts all boats.  That's just as true in the arts; James Baldwin may be more widely read and admired now than he was at the time of his death in 1987.  So it's probably no coincidence that the Drawing Center is honoring Beauford Delaney, Baldwin's mentor, with an exhibition of his drawings and other works, including an early portrait of a man who later became his fiercest champion. It's one of more than twenty completed by Delaney, who met Baldwin when the author of Giovanni's Room was just a teenager.  He's twenty-one here.

James Baldwin (1945)

Self Portrait (Yaddo, 1950)

Delaney, born in Tennessee and educated in Boston, had moved to New York in his late twenties, five years before Baldwin's birth and just as the Harlem Renaissance was coming to an end. The New York Public Library branch on 135th Street exhibited Delaney's early, academically influenced charcoal sketches.

"Harlem Athlete" (1929)

Delaney's development as an artist anticipates the Abstract Expressionism movement although he had no time for the macho posturing that accompanied it. Given his closeted homosexuality--apparently he had his first same sex experience with a man he met in the Boston Public Garden--I wondered if the Ramble might have inspired this colorful work.

"Central Park" (1950)

Delaney lived in a loft on Greene Street where his bohemian friends included sexually explicit author Henry Miller and artist Georgia O'Keefe, who painted his portrait.

"Greene Street" (1950)

With Baldwin's encouragement, Delaney moved to Paris in 1953, at almost the precise moment that New York City pre-empted its role as the capital of the art world.  But his distance from America only partially explains why he never became a major figure. Poverty, racism, homophobia, alcoholism and dementia all stacked the odds against him.

"Paris" (1953)

This work vividly captures the color of my first encounter with stained glass at the source of its inspiration.  We visited the iconic Gothic cathedral on a day trip from Orleans in the mid-sixties.  Delaney, whose father was a preacher, described it as "the most wonderful thing I have ever seen created by man."

 

"Chartres" (1954)

Here's what Baldwin had to say about his mentor in 1963, when alcohol and mental illness first began to take their toll:

He has been starving and working all of his life – in Tennessee, in Boston, in New York, and now in Paris. He has been menaced more than any other man I know by his social circumstances and also by all the emotional and psychological stratagems he has been forced to use to survive; and, more than any other man I know, he has transcended both the inner and outer darkness.

Delaney returned to the U.S. only once before his death for a brief family visit, in 1969.  He must have sketched this portrait of Rosa Parks from a photo.

He can capture the soulfulness of someone's eyes even in a tiny work.

Delaney was one of ten children, only four of whom survived.  His illiterate mother Delia, born into slavery, worked as a domestic to help support her family. She particularly valued education as a buffer against racism.  This unsentimental portrait, which Delaney painted six years after her death, evokes both dignity and toughness if not warmth.

"Mother's Portrait" (aka Portrait of Delia Delaney) (1964)

Abstraction may have had a calming influence, an aesthetic approach to what is now called "self-care."  Delaney was rarely without brush in hand.  He once used an old raincoat as a canvas when he ran out of the real thing.

Untitled  (ca 1964)

Delaney painted two portraits of Henry Miller, first in New York and again two decades later in Paris.  The exhibit also includes Miller's letters to his friend, whose work he greatly admired. "The impression I carried away was being saturated in color and light," Miller once wrote. "Poor in everything but pigment. With pigment he was lavish as a millionaire."

Henry Miller (ca 1967)

These two works hang side by side, although only one is identified as a self-portrait.

Untitled Self Portrait (ca 1968)

It's hard not to interpret the absence of pigment in these paintings as a psychological diminishment of the artist, almost as if the lights had gone off in his life.

 

Untitled (ca 1968)

Untitled (1970)

Delaney began to experience the symptoms of Alzheimer's disease after he returned to Paris from America, just four years before he was committed to St. Anne's Hospital for the Insane. He remained institutionalized there until his death in 1979, not long after he turned 77.  In this late return-to-form he appears to be enjoying himself one last time even if he is working from a long-ago memory.

"Self Portrait in a Paris Bath House" (1971)