Ten Things I've Learned from Beauford

By Silver Wainhouse

Silver Wainhouse is the author of Amazing Grace Is Yellow, a three-act play that presents Beauford's life as he moves from Knoxville to Boston, Boston to New York, and New York to Paris.


This is a warning!

Beauford Delaney has an infectious power. Start reading about him and looking at his work and he will infuse you, captivate you, get into your blood …

I am living proof of this experience. I was already drawn in by his story when I went to visit his grave. From that moment on, I have been under his continuing spell.

Silver Wainhouse at Beauford's Gravesite
© Discover Paris!
Beauford’s spirit is palpable - he speaks to me in a way that allowed me to write Amazing Grace Is Yellow. Below is a list of things I have learned from him.

1. Beauford was generous; sometimes even to a fault.

You always have enough to share.

2. He constantly sought those from whom he could learn, and took their advice as to when to move.

Mentors are life changers.

3. Beauford continued to study and take lessons from other painters he admired. He studied and incorporated newly-learned techniques.

Even genius needs practice and benefits from it.

4. One of his joys was to meet with friends in French cafés. There, he found people who cared about him and would check in on him, something he needed more and more as his health declined.

An artist needs community.

Café Scene
(1966) Oil on canvas
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
5. Beauford loved all kinds of music. His favorite was the spiritual “Amazing Grace.”

Music fortifies you and will get you through.

6. Beauford was homosexual. The hiding he did was such tremendous pressure.

The closet takes a toll.

The Eye
(1965) Oil on canvas
Private Collection
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
7. Beauford was a God-fearing man. Son of a preacher, faith was instilled in him at birth.

Believe in something greater than yourself.

8. Beauford had several personas and selected the appropriate one to adapt to the environment in which he found himself.

When someone calls your name, the part of you that answers depends upon who is calling.

9. Beauford’s legacy is real.

One has the ability to continue to touch lives after physical death.

10. Beauford always sought the sun, the son, and the light.

When we seek the light, we find grace -- and that grace is amazing!

Untitled
(circa 1960) Oil on canvas
Signed at lower right and on back of canvas
84 x 75 cm
© Estate of Beauford Delaney,
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator

The Art Story: Beauford Delaney

I'm taking a couple of weeks off to enjoy Paris and do some research on Beauford but did not want this week to pass without publishing something about him.

One of my readers shared the following link to a detailed Web page about him and I'm pleased to pass it along:

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/delaney-beauford/

1973 Invitation Card - Darthea Speyer Gallery
The page has a table of contents that makes it easy for readers to navigate the information shared. Several of the resources cited point back to this blog and the work I've done through Les Amis de Beauford Delaney to promote and preserve Beauford's legacy, which is gratifying!

What I like best about this page is the commentary presented on several of Beauford's paintings. I hope you enjoy it!

Beauford at the Luxembourg Garden

The Luxembourg Garden is my favorite place in Paris.

So I was tickled to read in correspondence between two of Beauford's dearest friends, Charley Boggs and Larry Calcagno, that Beauford enjoyed the garden as well!

Boggs wrote to Calcagno that he and Beauford visited the garden in early April 1965 and enjoyed the spring weather, sitting in the sun and watching the children play with their sailboats at the octagonal pond near the palace. He left Beauford there, sitting in a rented chair, while he went back to his atelier.

For those of you who are not familiar with the garden, here are some photos of the area mentioned in Boggs' letter.

Boat basin
© Discover Paris!

Father assists daughter with sailboat
© Discover Paris!

Children on a field trip
© Discover Paris!

Motorboats at the basin
© Discover Paris!

Fountain in boat basin
© Discover Paris!
Happily, sitting in chairs at the garden is now free of charge!

********
We're staging a reading of the Beauford Delaney play
Amazing Grace is Yellow
in Paris on October 16, 2019.

You can become a part of Beauford's legacy by supporting this event!

"Adopt an actor" to contribute 450€ or $500 for rehearsals and the actual reading by clicking HERE!

Beauford Delaney: A Study in Portraiture

On August 6, 2019, the Wells International Foundation (WIF) announced the opening for Beauford Delaney: A Study in Portraiture. This digital exhibition, curated by Maija Brennan, examines the evolution of Beauford’s style as he rendered images of persons he loved and admired.

Brennan is WIF’s 2019 summer intern. A rising senior at Smith College, she is majoring in art history – with a concentration in museum studies – and French. She is interested in learning how non-profit organizations work to fund artists and help them show their work and is passionate about making art available to the general public. She is especially interested in exploring how contemporary artists who struggle to promote their work can “even the playing field” using technology.

Maija Brennan
Wells International Foundation 2019 Summer Intern
Image courtesy of Wells International Foundation
WIF’s founder and CEO, Dr. Monique Y. Wells, learned of Brennan’s interest in WIF’s Summer Internship Program through Columbia Global Centers | Paris. Brennan was finishing her junior year abroad there when her French professor, who also served as Associate Director of Smith College in Paris, introduced her to Dr. Wells. She had been made aware of the 2016 art exhibition, Beauford Delaney: Resonance of Form and Vibration of Color, that WIF organized at Columbia Global Centers | Paris, and was excited about the prospect of creating a project around this artist’s work.

Brennan spent six weeks compiling research on Delaney’s art production, focusing on his portraiture and how these works represent some of the most important relationships in his life. She investigated the evolution of the composition and style of Delaney’s portraits as he matured as an artist and produced increasing numbers of Abstract Expressionist paintings. Based on this research, she selected several works for the exhibition.

Beauford Delaney: A Study in Portraiture presents portraits from three periods in Delaney’s life – the years he spent in Boston, New York City, and Paris. A fourth segment of the exhibition presents several self-portraits from the New York and Paris years. A timeline of the artist’s life provides additional perspective on each segment of the exhibition.

A large part of the challenge of creating this exhibition in a format that is easily navigable and pleasing to view on all kinds of devices, from widescreen desktop computers to smartphones. Viewers can click on each portrait to access a larger image and one to two paragraphs of information on a dedicated page about the work.

Another important aspect of the process was planning and implementing the marketing strategy that would make the exhibition known to the public. Brennan evaluated how to maximize her existing social media connections, strengthen profiles and make new connections that she will heavily rely upon in her professional life, and incorporate the many blog posts she wrote about Delaney’s portraits into her strategy. She formulated a plan over the course of a week and implemented the plan during the last week of her internship.

Instagram post announcing A Study in Portraiture
Detail of Café Scene (1966)
Image courtesy of Maija Brennan
On July 29, Brennan presented an extensive preview of the exhibition to a study abroad group from the University of Tennessee Knoxville. (Knoxville was Beauford’s hometown.) The students were enrolled in the "Art History in Paris" course taught by Professor Mary Campbell. Professor Campbell wrote the critique of A Study in Portraiture found on the exhibition Web site.

Maija Brennan presents exhibition to UTK students
Image courtesy of the Wells International Foundation
A total of twenty-one (21) portraits are displayed in the exhibition. The full depth and breadth of Delaney’s artistic genius are represented in the works selected for this online show.

Brennan had the following to say about the exhibition:

Beauford Delaney was an astonishingly talented painter whose works hang in some of today’s most culturally and artistically important institutions. I hope that this digital exhibit can be a reference point and educational tool for those who want to further their understanding of his life and art in the same way they would have had they visited one of these institutions. I also hope that visitors find the exhibition to be a place to simply celebrate the beautiful and sensitively rendered portraits he created throughout his lifetime.

To access Beauford Delaney: A Study in Portraiture, click HERE.

Beauford Delaney’s Self-portrait,1944

By Maija Brennan

Maija Brennan is the Wells International Foundation's 2019 summer intern. A rising senior at Smith College, she majors in French and art history with a concentration in museum studies. Her eight-week internship focuses on researching the life and art of painter Beauford Delaney and creating an online exhibition of a selection of his works.

One of the best-known Beauford Delaney paintings hangs in the American Art Gallery of the Art Institute of Chicago. A vividly stunning exploration of color and paint, Self-portrait, 1944 is one of his earliest self-portraits in circulation. Beauford was living on Greene Street at the time he created this painting, pushing his abilities with abstraction and the marks he was creating with paint and brush.

Self-portrait
(1944) Oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
By permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
In this self-portrait, Beauford stares at viewers from a three-quarters turn to his right in front of a muddy orange background. His skin tone and facial features are a beautiful mix of warm and cool tones: the browns and reds in his face are broken up by thick and gestural brushstrokes of green and blue. He wears a vibrant red cap and shirt with a blue garment draped over his shoulders.

Despite his bold use of color, the focal point of this self-portrait is Beauford’s asymmetrically large left eye, with the corresponding brow raised in suspicion. This element of Self-portrait, 1944 recurs in almost every subsequent self-portrait of Beauford: asymmetry in size and placement of the eyes, with one pupils represented asymmetrically regarding size and color. Beauford never spoke with anyone on this artistic decision, yet it has been commented on in previous posts on the Les Amis blog.

Self-portrait
(1964) Oil on canvas
Private collection
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
By permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
The eye is seen as a link between our exterior and interior selves, the “window to the soul.” Because of this, artists have used the eyes as symbols of something larger for centuries. Zeus, the King of the Gods in Greek mythology, was considered to be the “all-seeing eye,” a metaphor that connects sight and eyes to religion and God. Large, exaggerated eyes became synonymous with the portraiture in Egyptian art. The eyes in Egyptian images represented the presence of the divine.¹

When making connections between Beauford’s depictions of eyes in his self-portraits with possible artistic influences, it is first important to consider where and when he could have been exposed to certain art periods during his lifetime. The asymmetry of the eyes, along with the different coloration in the pupils he depicted, is reminiscent of early Christian art - specifically that of Byzantium.

Byzantine art is often characterized by the static nature in which figures are represented. Byzantine artists departed from classical methods of realistic depictions to focus on religious iconography and symbolism, and eyes became an important feature in conveying divine presence in religious images. The icon of Christ Pantocrator at St. Catherine’s Monastery Sinai is the most well-known example of how eyes were used in religious imagery to illustrate the presence of divinity.

Christ the Savior (Pantokrator)
Anonymous
(6th century) Encaustic on panel
Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai
Public domain
This painting of Christ has been interpreted to represent his dual nature as God and human. Christ’s left side (the viewer’s right) is more three-dimensional in his deep-set eye and hollowed cheekbones, his hand clutching a book of Gospel - the word of God. This side is said to represent the human qualities of Christ. His right side (the viewer’s left) is more flat and static, the eye staring flatly and widely out at viewers with his hand held up in the sign of a blessing. These elements illustrate his divine qualities, his godly traits.

Beginning with the French Symbolists in the 1890s, there was a renewed interest in Byzantine art. The Symbolists’ works leaned towards more decoration and abstraction, relying on religious symbols and iconography used by earlier Byzantine artists.

The Cyclops
Odilon Redon
(circa 1898) Oil on cardboard mounted on panel
65.8cm x 52.7cm
Kröller-Müller Museum Collection, Otterlo
Public Domain
This continued into the twentieth century with the Post-Impressionists. Art critic Roger Fry wrote extensively on Cézanne in particular, comparing the abstract simplicity of his work to the mosaics at Ravenna. He coined the term “Proto-Byzantines” and used it to describe Cézanne and Gauguin, but the name did not stick.²

The first art historian to make a direct link between modernist art and Byzantium was Matthew Stewart Prichard, an American art historian who eventually befriended Henri Matisse and introduced him to Byzantine style. Prichard was deputy director at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston at the turn of the century, eventually moving to Europe in 1906.³ Isabella Stewart Gardner had a collection of Byzantine art that was on display in the museum, and she often received letters from Prichard on his discoveries overseas and his blossoming friendships with modern artists.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was one of Beauford Delaney’s favorites when he lived in Boston during the 1920s. He even exchanged words with Ms. Gardner herself at one point. Because of the close connection the Gardner Museum had formed with Byzantine art and Matthew Prichard, we can conclude that Beauford could have been exposed to this period of art as early as his Boston years, inspired by the simple and abstract forms.

The first exhibition of Byzantine art in Paris did not occur until 1931. Beauford would not move to Paris for another 22 years, but even in New York he was aware of and inspired by French modernists who were experiencing a revival of Byzantine art in their country. Matisse became especially enamored with Byzantine coins, stating in 1914 that the Byzantine expression and his have the same aim with the reductionist and stylized use of line.⁵ His self-portrait from 1906 is eerily similar in expression and style to Beauford’s.

Self-Portrait in a Striped T-shirt
(1906) Oil on canvas
55cm x 46cm
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Public domain in the U.S.
Click HERE to view a full-sized image.
Whether or not Beauford was directly exposed to Byzantine art during his studies and museum visits, he found inspiration in Matisse, who was incorporating Byzantine aesthetics into his artwork when Beauford was only a child.

Beauford was a deeply religious person his entire life. His father was a Methodist preacher, and he entertained friends at parties with the gospel songs he knew by heart throughout his lifetime. Many of his portraits are imbued with religious symbolism, with those closest to him often represented with their hands held up in benediction and halos glowing over their heads. His abstractions from his Paris years were studies in the “religious light” he found upon arriving in France. It is not at all unlikely that he was aware of, and greatly touched by, the early Christian art of Byzantium.


¹ Fingesten, Peter. “Sight and Insight: A Contribution Toward An Iconography of the Eye.” Criticism, vol. 1, no. 1, 1959, pp. 20-21. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23091098. Accessed July 26, 2019.

² Fry, Roger. “Letter to the Editor,” The Burlington Magazine, XII, 1908, pg. 58.

³ Bullen, J. B. “Byzantinism and Modernism 1900-14.” The Burlington Magazine, vol. 141, no. 1160, 1999, pp. 668. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/888554. Accessed July 24, 2019.

⁴ Byron, Robert. “The Byzantine Exhibition in Paris.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, vol. 59, no. 340, 1931, pp. 27. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/864716. Accessed July 25, 2019.

⁵ Betancourt, Roland, and Maria Taroutina. Byzantium/Modernism: the Byzantine as Method in Modernity, pg 25. Brill, 2015.