Beauford Delaney

Beauford Delaney was born on the thirtieth of December 1901 at Knoxville, Tennessee, one of ten children of the Reverend Samuel Delaney — a Methodist Episcopal preacher and barber — and Delia Johnson Delaney, a domestic. He was raised in the small Black Methodist Knoxville household of his father across the closing decade of the Booker T. Washington-period Tennessee.

He was placed at six at the Knoxville Coloured Schools and at sixteen at the Knoxville Vine Avenue High School. He was apprenticed at eighteen in 1919 to the Knoxville commercial artist Lloyd Branson — a white painter who taught Delaney without fee on Sundays and supplied him with the basic materials.

He moved to Boston in 1923 at twenty-two and was admitted to the Massachusetts Normal Art School at the Massachusetts College of Art, the South Boston School of Art, and the Boston School of Painters — completing parts of the three-year programmes at each between 1924 and 1929.

He relocated to Greenwich Village at New York in November 1929 — arriving at the opening of the Great Depression — and rented for a dollar a week the closet-sized studio at 181 Greene Street, Manhattan that he occupied for the following twenty-four years. He took employment at the closing months of 1929 as the doorman of the Whitney Studio Club at 8 West Eighth Street, where the principal Whitney curator Juliana Force was the first to give him commissioned work.

He took portrait commissions across the inter-war period of the principal Black-music and Black-literary figures of the Greenwich Village period — among them the principal portraits of Marian Anderson (placed in this archive), Duke Ellington (placed in this archive), W. C. Handy, Ethel Waters, Countee Cullen, Marian Anderson and the boy James Baldwin, of whom Delaney was the principal childhood mentor and to whom Baldwin returned across his life as the principal moral example.

He relocated to Paris in October 1953 — at the urging of James Baldwin, who had moved to Paris five years earlier — and lived at the Clamart suburban Paris house of his friend Bernard Hassell for the principal portion of the following twenty-six years.

He completed across the Paris period the principal colour-field abstractionist works of his career — among them the Composition No. 16 (1954), the Yellow Field (1959), the Untitled (1960), and the principal series of the late 1960s and the 1970s — in which the gestural impastoed yellow-and-saffron field became the principal pictorial element. The Paris paintings are widely understood as the principal pre-Mark Rothko colour-field work in the New York School lineage.

He was institutionalised from 1975 at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne at the Paris Fourteenth Arrondissement for schizophrenic episodes, where he was visited by James Baldwin almost weekly for the closing four years of his life.

He died at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne on the twenty-sixth of March 1979 of complications of pulmonary disease, at seventy-seven.

He is honored here as the principal Black colour-field abstractionist of Paris.