Beauford Delaney
In the decade after Beaufort Delaney’s arrival in New York City in 1929, he began producing the urban scenes of Greenwich Village collectively known as his Greene Street paintings, named for the address of his studio apartment. Made between 1936 and 1952, these paintings express an unsettled sensibility and vary widely in their influences. Those of the mid-1940s, Untitled (Greenwich Village Street, New York) among them, reflect a modernist approach reminiscent of Fauvism’s chromatic register and the restless, swirling impasto brushwork of Vincent van Gogh. Impressionistic and given to passages of abstraction, “his forms,” as historian Ann E Gibson writes of these works, “knit into a single fabric, often united by a consistently textured surface, held together by integrated nets of colour and line coexisting on the surfaces of his paintings.” Such is this nocturnal scene, showing a street corner with a solitary figure beneath the El train line. By some critics' measure, Delaney's Greene Street paintings are largely rehearsals in borrowed styles. James Baldwin, writing on the artist, expressed a similar sentiment: Delaney’s paintings, he suggested, underwent a “most striking metamorphosis into freedom” when the artist later left America for the French capital. The Village, however, did not so much fade in Delaney’s memory as become incandescent. In 1968, from across the Atlantic, he revisited the same street corner in his luminously yellow Street Scene, which follows closely on Untitled (Greenwich Village Street, New York), in arrangement if not in palette.
b.1901, Knoxville; d.1979, Paris
A close confidant of the writer James Baldwin and friend of fellow painter Willem de Kooning, Beauford Delaney was uniquely positioned between the Harlem Renaissance and the rise of SoHo’s AbEx movement. He earned little lasting recognition in the States, however, and later followed Baldwin to Paris in 1953 at the encouragement of artist Palmer Hayden. In overview, Delaney’s shifting style finds no easy category; his abstractions are closer in sensibility to Tachism than Abstract Expressionism, and his figurative works aligned only loosely with l’Art Informel. There is a lyrical seduction to his compositions, the paint applied thickly and feelingly. He pursued no singular objective or ideal, was concerned with neither verisimilitude nor formalism. Only the colour yellow would prove a lasting preoccupation; his paintings “studies in light revealed.” To Delaney, such light extended beyond the seen to the felt, was at once real and symbolic; a supplication of hope against the spreading shadows. “I learned about light from Beauford Delaney” – Baldwin wrote of the artist in a 1964 catalogue essay for Galerie Lambert –
the light contained in every thing, in every surface, in every face. Many years ago in poverty and uncertainty, Beauford and I would walk together through the streets of New York City. He was then, and is now, working all the time, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he is seeing all the time; and the reality of his seeing caused me to begin to see.
Delaney’s yellow, however, could not keep out the dark. He would spend the last decade of his life plagued by paranoia, alcoholism, and Alzheimer’s. “There always seems to be the shadow,” the painter wrote to a benefactor, “which follows the light.” Delaney died an inpatient at Sainte Anne’s Hospital in Paris, his body consigned to an unmarked pauper’s grave.