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Saturday, March 13, 2021

Les Amis Celebrates Women's History Month - Part 2

Beauford portrayed two legendary female singers on canvas: Marian Anderson and Ella Fitzgerald.

Marian Anderson
(1965) Oil on canvas
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
J. Harwood and Louise B. Cochrane Fund for American Art
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator

Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald
(1968) Oil on canvas
Permanent collection of the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah
Gift of Dr. Walter O. and Mrs. Linda J. Evans
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator

The Anderson portrait inspired British opera singer Peter Brathwaite to create his own version of it as part of the 2020 Getty Museum Challenge to use everyday items at home to recreate a work of art. He launched his own project called "Rediscovering Black Portraiture" and recreated 93 works with amazing results.

Brathwaite poses in all his renditions of classic portraits of black people, from Mansa Musa to Barack Obama. Women were not off limits - he recreated portraits of the Queen of Sheba, the Virgin of Guadelupe, and other women in addition to Marian Anderson.

Brathwaite painted a raincoat to reproduce Anderson's jacket and painted his face to resemble the hue of Anderson's skin in Beauford's portrait. (No mention is made of whether he was aware of Beauford's raincoat painting, which is held by the Minneapolis Institute of Art.)

He created an 8-part tweet from the information posted about the reproduction on his Website.

To see the diptych of the photo of Brathwaite as Marian Anderson and the image of Beauford's portrait of her, click HERE.

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