Grievances from a Soul of Sorrow

Beauford's Untitled (1962-1964) was assigned Lot No. 81 for Black Art Auction's Fall Fine Art Sale on November 19, 2022. 

It sold for $53,125.

Untitled
(1962-1964) Gouache on paper
Signed and dated "Paris, 1964"
Inscribed: "for Amy(?) Erica + Tully, Paris August 20, 1962, with fond regards"
© Estate of Beauford Delaney,
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator

The date range for this work aroused my curiosity.  Beauford showed ten abstract gouaches in a 1964 Copenhagen exhibition called 10 American Negro Artists, and I wondered if this may have been one of them.

 Also, the online image of this work struck a chord in me. 

I found it to be particularly vibrant, and I wanted to do something special when I posted about it here.

Enter Marteena Mendelssohn, a junior at the American University of Paris (AUP) who is serving as the autumn intern for the Wells International Foundation. 

Marteena is a Creative Writing major and Film minor, and she has expressed interest in learning more about Beauford.

So, I invited her to have a look at some of the creative writing done by some of her intern predecessors (two of whom were also AUP students) and write some prose or poetry about this work on paper.

Find the resulting poem below.

Grievances from a Soul of Sorrow
by Marteena Mendelssohn

Let’s reconcile the belief that I is more than You. For you are who I am and you is I our truth. Inside of the tunnels of sorrow our truth holds light. In what we cannot see our spirits contain all the sight we need

                            To move forward

so we dig                               and we build                               and we move

with dark

bodies and light voices   that pave way into the black night blundering us into bits of bodies until our brown eyes turn into crimson blood on the backside of a painted canvas that’ll never see the day

            break

                                                Me

                                                                into the world of the unknown.

We tap into our souls and we make blood glimmer like sunshine. It’s not our light that bleeds into the darkness and unveils the parts

      You or I refuse to see, it is our faith in the light that allows us to be
                                                                                                                  u
                                                                                                                    s

so.

                               Take our light               take our truth

But don’t take us back to the starting line.