A Unique Take on Still Lifes

I've written about Beauford's Untitled (Grape Motif) here many times.

Untitled
(1946/1960) Pastel on paper
© Estate of Beauford Delaney,
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator

I first learned of this work in 2013, when Ron Rumford, Director of Dolan/Maxwell informed me that the gallery was placing it up for sale.

In 2015, I had the privilege of viewing the work myself, when Rumford took me to see it hanging in the office of Dr. William A. Dodd in Center City Philadelphia.

It has changed hands a few times since then and was shown at Art Basel Miami 2022 by the Schoelkopf Gallery.

It is now in a private collection.

For the longest time, the striking jagged, colorful lines surrounding the grapes in this work reminded me of another Beauford Delaney creation that I couldn't quite place in my mind.

I finally took the time to look for an image of the second work - and I found it in my digital folder devoted to works held by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Untitled
(1950) Pastel on paper
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
Image courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art

I asked Rumford and the Schoelkopf Gallery to comment on the obvious similarities between the two works.

Rumford had the following to say:

It is wonderful to learn of the Whitney’s Beauford Delaney pastel with mushrooms and leaves. We did not know of it when we had the still life with grapes pastel.

Surrounding rather humble subjects with radiating, dynamic zigging and zagging color is a unique approach to still life. Discovering a similar example of this way of working is very satisfying.

This work also calls to mind a 1952 oil we sold some 20 years ago with an African sculpture as the still life subject.

Untitled (African sculpture)
(1952) Oil on canvas
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
Image courtesy of Dolan/Maxwell

These three works show Delaney moving away from drawing or painting from the approach of observing objects within and relating to their setting.

Surely the sculpture, mushrooms, leaves and grapes are observed. Surrounding the chosen objects with electric color and forms that break from rational space move these works into another realm of expression having more to do with feeling than recording what is seen.

I also find it interesting that these works were made just before Beauford Delaney leaves New York for Paris.*

Erin O'Neill, Director of Research at the Schoelkopf Gallery, responded as follows:

While this work was produced in 1960, when Delaney resided in Paris, the concentric outlines harken back to a similar motif Delaney explored in another untitled pastel he made a decade earlier, now held in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art (1950).

Embodying the space between representation and abstraction, in the 1950 pastel, Delaney reimagined a classic modernist subject, a still life of mushrooms and botanicals, and injected it with a nonfigurative sense of color and form. The vegetation becomes electrified as the jagged outline of the leaves repeats itself, echoing outwards until bouncing off of the composition's edges.

In the 1960 example, Delaney advanced his investigation into this motif, but instead used grapes and softened the edges between the bands of color. These pastels convey Delaney's prowess for color and creation.

Form is not the only modernist element employed rhythmically in the works, color is also reiterated diversely—for instance, in the 1960 composition, the orange pastel is used as a band of color at the left of the pictorial field, as a sinuous contour towards the work's center, and as articulated highlights on the rounded forms of the grapes and their stems.

*After discussion with curators and among themselves regarding the style of Untitled (Grape Motif), Dolan/Maxwell determined that it was more consistent with works Beauford created in the 1940s. They believe Beauford may have signed and dated it much later than he actually created it.