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.
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."
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.
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.
Young English Lieutenant (1943)
Edna Porter (1943)
Presence (Irene Rose) (1944)
Untitled detail by Beauford Delaney (1962)
Bernard Hassell (ca 1963)
Portrait of a Young Man (ca 1963)
James Baldwin (ca 1967)
It's hard not to see the Ku Klux Klan in this uncharacteristic work.
Put this in your pipe and smoke it, cancel culture!
I remember that the bar, that night, was more than ordinarily crowded and noisy. All of the habitués were there and many strangers, some looking, some just staring. There were three or four very chic Parisian ladies sitting at a table with their gigolos or their lovers or perhaps simply their country cousins, God knows; the ladies seemed extremely animated, their males seemed rather stiff; the ladies seemed to be doing most of the drinking. There were the usual paunchy, bespectacled gentlemen with avid, sometimes despairing eyes, the usual knife-blade lean, tight-trousered boys. One could never be sure, as concerns these latter, whether they were after money or blood or love. They moved about the bar incessantly, cadging cigarettes and drinks, with something behind their eyes at once terribly vulnerable and terribly hard. There were, of course, les folles, always dressed in the most improbable combinations, screaming like parrots the details of their latest love affairs--their love affairs always seemed to be hilarious. Occasionally one would swoop in, quite late in the evening, to convey the news that he--but they always called each other 'she'--had just spent time with a celebrated movie star, or boxer. Then all of the others closed in on the newcomer and they looked like a peacock garden and sounded like a barnyard. I always found it difficult to believe that they ever went to bed with anybody, for a man who wanted a woman would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man would certainly not want one of them. Perhaps, indeed, that was why they screamed so loud. There was the boy who worked all day, it was said, in the post office, who came out at night wearing makeup and earrings and with his heavy blond hair piled high. Sometimes he actually wore a skirt and high heels. He usually stood alone unless Guillaume walked over to tease him. People said that he was very nice, but I confess that his utter grotesqueness made me uneasy; perhaps in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns some people's stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did no--so grotesquely--resemble human beings.
David, James Baldwin's white, sexually conflicted protagonist, acidly captures the atmosphere of a Fifties gay bar where self-loathing flowed more freely than alcohol, and one that lingered well into my generation. Sure the plot is a more than a little overwrought for modern readers--death by guillotine, for example!--but Baldwin understands well how life in the closet led to melodrama. Although Gore Vidal, the first American novelist to write explicitly about homosexuality in the City and the Pillar (1948) romanticized the forbidden love between two men nearly a decade earlier, Baldwin considers its collateral damage, too.
"Well," said Hella [who has just confirmed that David, her fiancé, is gay] "I'm going home. I wish I'd never left it. "If I stay here much longer," she said, later that morning, as she packed her bag, "I'll forget what it's like to be a woman." She was extremely cold, she was very bitterly handsome. "I'm not sure any woman can forget that," I said. "There are women who have forgotten that to be a woman doesn't simply mean humiliation, doesn't simply mean bitterness. I haven't forgotten it yet," she added, "in spite of you. I'm not going to forget it. I'm getting out of this house, away from you, just as fast as taxis, trains and boats will carry me."
If ever a novel was custom made for a book club discussion, this is it!
Update:
The New York Public Library "Treasures" exhibit includes pages from the manuscript of Giovanni's Room. In the mid-1950s, Baldwin's American editor suggested cutting an early section describing the male narrator's early encounter with another boy; Alfred A. Knopf, one of America's most prestigious publisher, eventually rejected the book due to its "sexual perversion." Dial Press published it in 1956.
The exhibit also includes covers of two editions published in England.
The Museum of the City of New York and El Museo del Barrio have a reciprocal admission fee so it made sense to see more Andy at Gay Gotham, too.
I wonder what he would have thought of the 1920s "pansy craze"?
The exhibit includes work representing plenty of the usual suspects besides Andy. Like this "coded" photo of E.M. Forster (on top) by George Platt Lynes. Supposedly only gay men would realize that the other guy was his lover.
Have you ever seen James Baldwin without a cigarette? The under-appreciated Beauford Delaney painted this colorful portrait.
Keith Haring drew this poster advertising a modern dance event.
I think this is Bill T. Jones.
The depth of my ignorance about lesbian history is appalling. Parisian flaneur and New Yorker writer Janet Flanner wrote this love letter in the shape of a tulip to Mercedes de Acosta who in turn had a crush on Greta Garbo. I didn't even know Flanner was gay. Live and learn.
On the other hand, there's not much I don't know about cruising. Gay men sunned themselves on abandoned piers in the Village. Those were the pre-AIDs days. Down-low photographer Alvin Baltrop documented this scene, too.
A series of photos, all discreetly shot with a Polaroid by the same man, evoked nostalgia for the Times Square that frightened and appalled me as a naive college kid.
The movie marquee advertises "The Fortune Cookie." Not that anyone would be looking at it in this shot!
If I had seen this magazine on sale at the time, I probably would have made a furtive purchase at one of the grimy newsstands. How quaint the cover seems now!
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