For this holiday season, I'm bringing you an entire playlist of songs by one of Beauford's favorite singers - Ella Fitzgerald.
Click on the link beneath the image and enjoy.
Here's wishing you a VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY NEW YEAR!
See you again on January 8, 2022!
When I launched the campaign to raise funds for Beauford's tombstone, I contacted the U.S. Embassy to inquire whether they could help me research information about the French government's acquisition of Beauford Delaney works. They told me that France owns two of Beauford's paintings and sent me an image of Jazz, a painting that they told me was allocated to the French Embassy in Taipei, Taiwan. They obtained the image from France's Fonds national d'art contemporain (National Contemporary Art Fund).
I published this information in an article dated April 6, 2010.
The Centre national des arts plastique (CNAP; English translation: National Center of Plastic Arts) manages the works amassed by the Fonds national d'art contemporain on behalf of France since 1791. I was privileged to be invited by Jean-Baptiste Delorme, Conservateur du patrimoine - Responsable de la collection arts plastiques (1945-1989) to visit one of their archive facilities earlier this week to see Beauford's works in person!
Frequently, photographs of a particular work neither resemble each other nor do justice to the original, and this was definitely the case for Jazz.
Delorme and I discussed this work at length, including the fact that it was shown at the Musée Galliera in 1967, was purchased directly from Beauford in 1968, and bears the name of a second, earlier Beauford Delaney work - Portrait of Marian Anderson (1965). A letter that Beauford wrote in French to the French government and dated March 16, 1958 (the year is evidently written in error, given the previously mentioned facts) states that the government has informed him that they have purchased Portrait of Marian Anderson. He expresses his joy about the fact that this work is "appreciated by the government of a country that I love and where I chose to live" (my translation).
The second abstract, which is untitled (sans titre), is much larger (130 x 96 cm / 51.2 x 37.8 in) than Jazz (60 x 49 cm / 23.6 x 19.3 in). It was shown at the Salon des Réalités nouvelles exhibition in Paris in 1972. CNAP loaned this work to the United States of Abstraction: American Artists in France exhibition that was shown at the Musée d'art de Nantes in Nantes, France (May 19 to July 18, 2021) and the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, France (August 6 to October 21, 2021).
Both museums are part of the FRAME (FRench American Museum Exchange) network, a group of 32 major U.S. and French museums whose mission is to promote cultural exchange through the development of innovative exhibitions, educational and public programs.
The coloring and the size of Sans titre, 1963 remind me of another untitled painting that hung in the Resonance of Form and Vibration of Color exhibition in Paris in 2016. It now belongs to the Mint Museum in North Carolina.
About CNAP (excerpted from the CNAP Website):
The Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP) is a public institution under the French Ministry of Culture. It fosters and supports artistic creation in France in all areas of the visual arts: painting, performance art, sculpture, photography, installation art, video, multimedia, graphic arts, design and graphic design. It follows young artists closely, provides expertise and support to the emergence of new forms, and assists artists and contemporary art professionals.
On behalf of the French State, CNAP expands and manages France’s national contemporary art collection, the Fonds national d’art contemporain, of over 105,000 works. Each year, it lends some 2,500 works from its collection.
Rachel Cohen: Brief Introduction to Part II
(Read Part 1 HERE.)
What’s written here is transcribed and edited from the second part of a conversation I had with Knoxville Museum of Art curator Stephen Wicks. The conversation began from Wicks’s close observations of Beauford Delaney’s Portrait of James Baldwin, 1966, and the discoveries Wicks had made about the way Delaney was evidently thinking not only about James Baldwin, but also about Alberto Giacometti and Giacometti’s biographer James Lord, mingling ideas about the three men and their work in his painting.
Delaney had long admired Giacometti’s work, knew him in Paris, made a pastel sketch of him, and mourned his passing when Giacometti died in January 1966. Delaney also knew another figure in Giacometti’s world, James Lord, who would eventually write a magisterial Giacometti biography, and had, the year before, in 1965, published his A Giacometti Portrait about the experience of being painted by Giacometti. Delaney knew Lord well enough to have fed him what he wrote to Lord apologetically had been an “awful lunch” at Delaney’s studio in Clamart. After Giacometti’s death, Delaney read Lord’s Giacometti Portrait with interest and spoke of it in this letter he wrote to Lord, also in 1966.
At the same time, Delaney’s dear friend James Baldwin was entering a new period in his renown, and Delaney was keeping files of press clippings of Baldwin’s activities – including the coverage and cover photo of Baldwin in Time Magazine. After a long time apart, in the summer of 1966, Delaney spent two important months with Baldwin in Istanbul, and began his 1966 painting of Baldwin there.
Thus, ideas about mortality, legacy, and what Delaney described to Lord as the “delicate ambiance between two friends,” are in the background, and the foreground, of Delaney’s Portrait of James Baldwin, 1966.
For this part of our conversation, I have transcribed a section where Stephen Wicks talks about the actual blending of different figures in the painting itself, and others where he and I spoke together about the atmospheres and techniques of Giacometti and Delaney, about the great essay by James Baldwin on Beauford Delaney’s work, "On the Painter Beauford Delaney," that was published in 1964, and about how Wicks worked from that essay to curate the important show Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door at the Knoxville Museum of Art in 2020.
— Rachel Cohen, Chicago
December 8, 2021
Rachel Cohen: I found it striking, and kind of delightful, that you think you’ve found some of James Lord’s facial features in the painting. Tell me about that.
Stephen Wicks: I was actually looking at the 1965 press photograph of Baldwin (that I think was the basis for the blue ink sketch of Baldwin by Delaney) and at period photographs of James Lord from around the time that the book was written and the sitting was happening, and I found frontal shots of Lord that appeared to align with Delaney’s 1966 painting of Baldwin.
And I just kept looking at Lord’s tight mouth that's tucked up right underneath the nose and the nose actually has this fairly bulbous base and I thought that's the way the nose looks in the Delaney painting. Baldwin doesn't have a nose like that, Baldwin's mouth isn't like that and it led me to think Delaney might have been looking at Lord’s image for some of the key features.
RC: I wondered if Delaney might have been laughing to himself as he was doing it, kind of making Giacometti's Lord, at the same time that he was making Delaney’s Baldwin. This kind of overlapping… there’s also overlap in the two painters’ artistic interests, I think.
SW: According to David Leeming’s Delaney biography [Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney], as early as 1953 or ‘54, Delaney is supposedly admiring Giacometti’s work for quote “its simple lines of African sculpture.” Both Giacometti and Delaney place great attention on the volume of the head of their sitters, and in some ways that’s reflective of their mutual interest in African sculpture. And both thought about depicting people in ways that represented a spiritual or psychological portrait rather than a physical portrait. Certain traits or qualities seen as important such as the mind, the eyes, and the head would be enlarged – it's the same thing you see in a lot of medieval art where this presence of an enhanced spiritual awareness is denoted by enlarged eyes.
RC: I find it really fruitful to think about Delaney and Giacometti together, because there’s something similar about their intentions, about how they understood abstraction and figuration, and what they were able to bring through, the way they worked so long on their canvases.
SW: And the end result is as much or more a record of that struggle, and their internal atmosphere during the time that the work is going on, as it is a record of the sitter or the subject matter. The sitter usually is consumed or withered away in the process of all that energy coming out.
Usually as you create someone's portrait, you're putting marks, matter, together, you're building up and out fleshing out. In the case of Giacometti, the more he goes at that figure and tries to bring it into shape the more it ends up eroded, and with Delaney a lot of his figures are “dissolved” by the veils of abstract brushwork.
At the Galerie Lambert show [important Delaney show in Paris in 1964], people were confused about the difference between a painting that's just total abstraction and another one that appears 80% abstraction but yet there's clearly the profile or silhouette of a figure. Delaney viewed them all as “studies in light.” I think ultimately Delaney dissolves and erodes a lot of his sitters in a way that’s similar to what Giacometti does, but the effect is very different.
RC: Say a little more about the contrast.
SW: With Delaney, it is almost as if he's depicting the light within sitters that seems to radiate or break the boundaries of their outer shell, or that bombards them from the outside in a way that makes them appear spectral rather than a solid figure sitting in space.
RC: And what would you say that Giacometti is...
SW: With Giacometti, it seems more like he's tugging at the raw material that he's using to represent the sitter, he's pulling it, in elongating it, attenuating it, peeling back the skin, pulling the muscle away, getting at the center, getting at the truth, maybe, of the figure ... taking away any likeness, leaving only the raw architecture of the figure. And yet somehow, when you look at those abstracted elongated sculptures or paintings by Giacometti, you're still able to see who's being depicted. Somehow he's left enough trace there for you to make the connection.
RC: I think that's a wonderful comparison, that seems right, because Giacometti is so architectural and sculptural, and in Delaney, it’s …
SW: it's light and color.
The surface of Giacometti’s sculptures and paintings are built up and textural and gestural in a way that you see in quite a few of Delaney’s paintings, but again, the handwriting is different. You've got that same desire not to hide the mark, not to suppress it. To leave that record of it, an honest record that an artist of integrity wouldn't want to erase.
Alberto Giacometti in his Montparnasse studio in Paris,
photographed by his wife, Annette
Author: FAAG Paris
Archives Fondation Giacometti
© Succession Alberto Giacometti (Fondation Giacometti, Paris + ADAGP, Paris) 2019
CC-BY-SA-4.0
RC: I’m really interested in the quality of time – time in the painting and the time of painting.
SW: Take cubism and its radical approach, for instance. Instead of having this fixed view of the world, you are getting multiple views in one image in a manner that conveys an element of time. In the works we’re discussing here, Giacometti and Delaney create an image that has some resemblance to what they actually saw with their eyes, but then with that are their perceptions of the sitter’s essence or inner likeness, all the while conveying something of their own internal world in the way they shape the image. These elements are constantly working to resolve themselves or maybe maintain a state of tension and often it’s the tension that we love.
RC: In both cases, Delaney and Giacometti, there’s not only the long work on individual paintings, there’s also long work with certain sitters, and in that way I think the real comparison with the way Delaney painted Baldwin, over and over, is the way Giacometti painted his own brother Diego, over and over, through his whole career. James Lord wrote a book about being painted, but he wasn’t in that relationship of sitting, through the whole life of the painter, the way Diego was, and the way Baldwin was for Delaney. I mean I think Baldwin and Delaney did think of each other as family.
SW: What I find interesting too is, you know as you were mentioning Baldwin was just becoming this international figure in the mid 1960s and yet at that time, I think we have maybe the greatest number of Baldwin portraits by Delaney in this window of time. You've got the 1967 painting that Rosenfeld Gallery displayed recently [James Baldwin in Be Your Wonderful Self], you’ve got The Sage Black (James Baldwin), 1967. Of course, there's the 1966 portrait that we've been talking about, and the one that's held by the Chrysler Museum [Portrait of James Baldwin, 1965]. These are among the most significant portraits of Baldwin and they happened during this time, when, as you say, Delaney and Baldwin maybe had a hard time finding time to be in each other's presence with the exception of the 1966 summer trip to Istanbul.
I think about what Delaney said to James Jones when Jones was visiting him in Paris, and looking at Delaney’s painting of Ella Fitzgerald – this brilliant yellow orange abstraction, and then some eyes and nose and the mouth. And Jones is going what is this about and it says Ella Fitzgerald but doesn't look at all like her, why did you make it look this way, and Delaney said, “Oh no, I've never laid eyes on Ella Fitzgerald. I just painted something ‘I saw in my mind.’”
I see this in the 1966 James Baldwin painting. It's really something he saw in his mind after digesting and absorbing and internalizing all of these different elements that had been in his thoughts around the time that this portrait began to take shape.
RC: You know, you’ve mentioned that you think Delaney was hoping that Baldwin would be his “chronicler” the way that Lord was Giacometti’s. And that that hope might be present in the 1966 portrait. But I wonder if maybe also Delaney felt Baldwin already was that chronicler, because of the important essay for the catalogue of what was probably the biggest show of Delaney’s work in his lifetime, the 1964 Galerie Lambert show, for which Baldwin wrote the catalogue essay. That essay was beautiful and Delaney knew it was beautiful and that it showed great reverence for his work.
SW: Delaney probably understood that based on Baldwin's schedule and the demands that his life was under as a leading international figure, getting that essay for the show was equivalent to what Lord did for Giacometti.
It’s hard to overstate the significance of that essay. To take the 38-year relationship and squeeze it down into an essay that speaks volumes about the lasting lessons Delaney taught him, what Baldwin owed him and what one should see when looking at Delaney’s art.
I feel like Baldwin's words have actually taken a body of Delaney’s work—the Clamart abstractions, in particular— and elevated it in terms of people's ability to see and appreciate it.
In the exhibition we presented here in Knoxville [Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door, 2020] I tried to, what's the word, channel James Baldwin. He was kind of my co-curator and when I was reading that essay for the 1964 Galerie Lambert show, I thought, how would I approach the Clamart abstractions, how would I lay them out in a way that James Baldwin would have and I tried to go about it in a way that gave you this feeling of sequential atmospheres seen through Delaney’s Clamart studio window that Baldwin describes as this portal of artistic ideas.
Through the Unusual Door catalog cover
RC: In that essay, Baldwin really brings the reader to the studio in Clamart, where Baldwin stayed with Delaney one whole summer, and brings the light and darkness through that window.
SW:I tried to arrange the paintings, some reminiscent of the brilliant first light of day and some maybe right before it becomes almost too dark to see anything but deep blue. I wanted to suggest a sequence of views of light as Beauford experienced them looking through that window. To me those words of Baldwin’s were so helpful and so meaningful.
RC: That's a wonderful insight into the exhibition. The way you staged that room of the late abstractions.... I found that extremely illuminating and I was so glad you devoted that space to that. I remember standing there with you also and really talking those over.
SW: Delaney often painted the abstractions with a dark base layer and then he would add brighter veils of gestural brushwork in circular patterns. His letters from Clamart indicate a new interest in conveying movement as well as light, and in the union of the two. Somehow, by combining movement and light, he was unlocking something that was taking him where he wanted his art to go and eventually those top layers become brilliant while somehow still allowing us to glimpse the darkness at the base of the composition.
It makes me think of a letter that Baldwin wrote on behalf of Delaney. I think it was for a fellowship that Delaney wanted to actually go out away from the city and work from nature. And Baldwin says something about, how, coming out of the darkness of Tennessee and his roots into the light, no one has endured a greater struggle or more difficult journey than Delaney, and I almost feel like in many ways, some of the abstractions of Clamart and some of his later portraits that have that same abstract brushwork. It's as if he's working each image from its own darkness into its own light.
Rachel Cohen is a professor of creative writing at the University of Chicago. She writes about art for the New Yorker, Apollo Magazine and other places, and you can find her art notebook at www.rachelecohen.com or on IG @rachelcohennotebook.
Stephen Wicks is the Barbara W. and Bernard E. Bernstein Curator at the Knoxville Museum of Art, and organized the 2020 exhibition Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door, which examined the life and art of painter Beauford Delaney within the context of his thirty-eight-year relationship with writer James Baldwin and the ways their ongoing intellectual exchange shaped one another’s creative output and worldview.
Rachel Cohen: A Word of Introduction
In February of 2020, just before all locked down, there was a wonderful conference, organized by Amy Elias at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, about the relationship of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin.
Delaney grew up in Knoxville, and the museum there, under the direction of Stephen Wicks, has gradually and carefully accumulated one of the most important collections of Delaney’s work in the world. The conference was planned to be simultaneous with an extraordinary exhibition, curated by Wicks, called Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door.
I had begun writing about the relationship between Baldwin and Delaney in 2003, as part of a book called A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, and for me the conference and exhibition were a rare opportunity to be immersed in artistic work I had cared about for a long time.
On a wonderful afternoon at the Knoxville Museum of Art, Stephen Wicks and I stood together in front of a yellow painting with a curious hatch work of very black lines, Portrait of James Baldwin from 1966, in the collection of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. It is unlike any other Delaney painting.
Stephen’s ideas about that painting – about the ways you can see in it a confluence of Delaney’s ideas about portraiture and abstraction, his relationship to James Baldwin, his interest in the writer James Lord, and his long admiration for the painter Alberto Giacometti – really surprised me and stayed with me. So, I was delighted when Monique Wells got in touch about this 1966 painting, giving Stephen and me the chance to revisit that conversation. This allowed me to learn about the new research and thinking he’s done about this work since that time.
I’ve edited our conversation to appear in two parts here as part of the record that we are all so grateful to the Les Amis blog for keeping for the community around Beauford Delaney, in the present and for the future.
— Rachel Cohen, Chicago
November 30, 2021
*****************
Rachel Cohen: Stephen, tell me a little about this painting, Portrait of James Baldwin, 1966 and how the research on it has been coming together, before the exhibition and since.
Stephen Wicks: Well, what I knew about first was the sketch [of Baldwin by Delaney] that I came across when we did the exhibition here in Knoxville. It felt like it was the only thing I had seen that appeared to be a precedent for Delaney’s 1966 Baldwin portrait that I thought was so remarkable.
As I began looking through the archive, I stumbled upon another work, this pastel sketch of Giacometti in a batch of things from that same time, and started seeing these different characters in this cast stepping on to the stage.
And then there was a letter that I saw when I was at the Schomberg Center in New York. I was looking for Baldwin letters, from Delaney to Baldwin, and I see one addressed to this “James,” and I think here’s a Baldwin letter, oh, James Lord, who is that, and then I started doing more research and realized what this meant.
RC: That letter from Delaney was written in the year Giacometti had died, and the year after James Lord had just published his book, A Giacometti Portrait, that’s like a diary of being portrayed by Giacometti. It’s really about the kind of studio practice we’ve talked about. Giacometti hurling himself at the canvas, and taking it apart, sometimes he will paint and sometimes he won’t and he’s just ...
SW: Wrecking it every day.
RC: Like a sine curve. Making and unmaking a painting. I think that book would have fascinated Delaney. Like what you were saying about “leaving a record of the struggle.”
SW: At the same time, even though Delaney’s process went on over a long time, making and making again, even still, from the letters from Clamart, I don’t ever really get the sense of struggling. It’s as if he’s finding this new voice. The view of nature outside his Clamart studio window is feeding him, but he also writes repeatedly of turning within himself looking within himself. Delaney is channeling this natural imagery through the window in ways that are just filled with power and momentum.
RC: It’s true, that’s really a different atmosphere of work than what we know of Giacometti.
SW: Delaney was aware of Giacometti’s work and admired it as early as his New York years, and then was acquainted with him in Paris. But the degree to which they knew each other, whether they visited each other’s studios, I just don’t know ...
Delaney and Lord had evidently known each other for years. In the letter to Lord, Delaney talks about how he regretted the awful lunch he fed to Lord when Lord visited him at Clamart.
That letter, in addition to the pastel sketch of Giacometti, and the fact that these sketches for the Baldwin portrait before it was completed looked almost as much like Giacometti sketches as they did like a Delaney sketch, all these factors just fell into place in a way that I think helped me resolve my view of the 1966 James Baldwin painting.
Never in Delaney’s production have I seen a portrait where the background and the figure are so divorced from one another. It’s as if he creates this yellow green orange abstraction and then decides later to lay down these marks in black to define this framework figure that almost looks like it’s been scored or branded into the field of yellow.
RC: Here I think might be a good place just to say that great artists have a facility for “trying out” other artists’ styles, which doesn’t at all mean that their work is derivative of those other artists. When Picasso tries out Braque, he’s not derivative of Braque, he’s expanding his own possibilities, maybe making a commentary.
SW: Yeah, I don’t think it was possible for Delaney to shift into a realm where he was just plugging in someone else’s style. Anything that he saw or came into contact with he might pick up elements of that, they might be swirling around his mind, but what came off of that brush or what came out of those hands was always his authentic deeply felt response to whatever subject he was trying to depict – whether his own internal atmosphere in turmoil, or that turmoil that he read in someone else that he was portraying, it’s always authentic and it's always deeply felt. The same is true of Giacometti – always deeply felt.
In that letter to Lord, Delaney is talking about how he marvels at “the delicate ambiance between” the two men, Giacometti and Lord. And I think at this time Delaney was thinking about Baldwin – thinking “How do I find a way to be around him … he’s not in my life as much as I’d like … how wonderful it would be if he would write a piece about my studio practice ....
RC: Baldwin is becoming an international activist and celebrity – The Fire Next Time is published in 1963, Baldwin and Buckley debated in February of 1965, Baldwin is in demand, traveling a lot.
SW: In this period, Delaney is actually making Baldwin portraits based on press images, photographs, and other secondhand images of Baldwin … not that he needed them, because clearly, in his vivid memory, he had all kinds of images of Baldwin, and he was also creating portraits from memory.
RC: Maybe, in a way, it interested him, or was emotionally necessary to him to reconcile this new public Baldwin with the intimate and remembered and sketched Baldwin.
SW: During this time, Delaney is saving clippings of Baldwin being in the news – he appeared at this rally, or he’s having this head-to-head with William F. Buckley – in some cases, even sending the clippings to Baldwin…. I think I’m the person who suggested that the Chrysler Museum portrait of Baldwin from 1965 was a reverse image of the Baldwin Time Magazine cover of March 17, 1963.
And then it goes from drought to flood, when Delaney gets to go to Istanbul and hang out with Baldwin, for an extended period, I guess it was July 7th through late August of 1966. I know from [Delaney’s friend and biographer] David Leeming that he started the portrait there in Istanbul, but I don’t know whether that means he did the beginning sketch on that trip, or whether he had an actual canvas that size that he was lugging around, but anyway he finished it after he returned to Paris.
RC: All these things are coming together in the painting – Giacometti’s death, James Lord’s book, Baldwin’s essay about Delaney, the visit with Baldwin, and the distance from Baldwin.
Come back to the blog next week for more of what Stephen Wicks and Rachel Cohen had to say about this in Part II.
Rachel Cohen is a professor of creative writing at the University of Chicago. She writes about art for the New Yorker, Apollo Magazine and other places, and you can find her art notebook at www.rachelecohen.com or on IG @rachelcohennotebook.
Stephen Wicks is the Barbara W. and Bernard E. Bernstein Curator at the Knoxville Museum of Art, and organized the 2020 exhibition Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door, which examined the life and art of painter Beauford Delaney within the context of his thirty-eight-year relationship with writer James Baldwin and the ways their ongoing intellectual exchange shaped one another’s creative output and worldview.
