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.
(1966) Oil on canvas
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
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.
Blue ink on sketchbook paper, 5 ½ x 3 ½ inches
Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, Tennessee
Photograph by Bruce Cole
© The Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
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.
Pastel on paper, 20 x 16 inches
The Estate of Beauford Delaney, Knoxville, Tennessee
© The Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
(Image horizontally flipped and cropped from original)
Poll Art Foundation, legal successor of photographer Erhard Wehrmann
CC BY-SA 3.0 DE
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 ...
1964 Oil on canvas
45,66 x 31,69 inches
Image courtesy of l'Institut Giacometti
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.
(1965) Oil on canvas
Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA
© Estate of Beauford Delaney,
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
May 17, 1963
Fair Use claim
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.
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