Beauford Delaney

Beauford Delaney was born on the thirtieth of December 1901 at Knoxville, Tennessee, eighth of the ten children — four lived to adulthood — of Samuel Delaney, a barber and Methodist preacher, and Delia Delaney, born into slavery. The Knoxville painter Lloyd Branson saw the boy's gift and helped send him to Boston, where he studied from 1923 at the Massachusetts Normal Art School, the South Boston School of Art, and the Copley Society. In 1929 he came to New York — Harlem first, then Greenwich Village, working at the Whitney's galleries while he painted.

From 1936 his studio at 181 Greene Street was a hearth of the Village: portraits of Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, W. C. Handy, Marian Anderson, Ethel Waters; street scenes of fire escapes and lampposts in impasto light. In 1940 a fifteen-year-old James Baldwin knocked at that door — and found, he would say all his life, his spiritual father, the first proof that a Black man could be an artist. Henry Miller wrote of him; the friendship with Baldwin never broke.

In 1953 he sailed for Rome, stopped in Paris, and stayed the rest of his life. There the portraits gave way to pure luminous abstraction — canvases saturated in his signature yellow, light itself as subject — shown at the Galerie Paul Facchetti, the American Cultural Center, and in 1964 at the Galerie Lambert, with Baldwin writing the catalogue. He lived at Clamart and then on the rue Vercingétorix in Montparnasse, painting through decades of poverty and a long struggle with mental illness, borne while friends — Baldwin devoted among them — kept watch.

In 1975 he was committed to St. Anne's hospital in Paris, and there he died on the twenty-sixth of March 1979; he is buried at Thiais, outside the city. The world has since come back for him: exhibitions on both continents, and his portrait of Baldwin crossing a million pounds at auction. Honored be Beauford Delaney, who carried the light through every dark room he was given.