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.
(1966) Oil on canvas
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
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.
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
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.
(1967) Oil on canvas
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
Image from Michael Rosenfeld Gallery Website
(1967) Oil on canvas
Private collection
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
Image from Artsmia Website
(1965) Oil on canvas
Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA
© Estate of Beauford Delaney,
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
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.’”
(1968) Oil on canvas
Permanent collection of the SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah
Gift of Dr. Walter O. and Mrs. Linda J. Evans
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
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.
© Les Amis de Beauford Delaney
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.
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