Dolan/Maxwell Shows Beauford Abstract at The Winter Show

The Winter Show, America’s premiere art, antiques, and design fair, brings together the world's leading fine and decorative arts dealers. The fair was founded by East Side House Settlement in 1954 to raise critical funds to support tens of thousands of New Yorkers who are most in need. 

East Side House is a community-based organization serving the Bronx and Northern Manhattan; its programs focus on education and technology as gateways out of poverty and as the keys to economic opportunity. All ticket sales proceeds from The Winter Show provide unrestricted funds for East Side House's life-changing programs.

Dolan/Maxwell Gallery is showing rare and important works by Modern African American masters, including Romare Bearden, Robert Blackburn, Ed Clark, and Dox Thrash, at the fair.

The luscious Beauford Delaney abstract shown below is one of them.

Untitled
(1960) Oil on canvas
Private collection
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
Image courtesy of Dolan/Maxwell Gallery

Ron Rumford, Director at Dolan/Maxwell, comments on this painting as follows:

Beauford Delaney’s non-objective yellow canvases made soon after he established himself in Paris each have very distinct, rich surfaces. Untitled 1960 is notable for its creamy paint textures and soft, closely modulated palette of greens, yellows, hints of orange and very pale greys. Delaney’s use of color is structural and patterns not unlike camouflage seem to almost emerge.

Alas, no set pattern exists, and the very buttery paint has seduced our eyes, leading our gaze over and all around the lush surface. Untitled 1960 is a luminous painting with a quiet, almost spiritual glow that has been carefully coaxed into being with each of Delaney’s expressive brushstrokes.

This painting is also distinctive in that Delaney has included his Paris address “Clamart Seine France 68 R P V Couturier”, along with his signature and year of creation on the back of this quietly powerful canvas.

Untitled 1960 (verso)
Image courtesy of Dolan/Maxwell Gallery

The Winter Show at the Park Avenue Armory continues through Sunday, January 29, 2023. 

For more information about the show, click HERE.

To learn about Dolan/Maxwell at The Winter Show, click HERE.

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.

Pastel Portrait of a Man to Be Auctioned by Case Antiques

Beauford's Portrait of a Man will be auctioned by Case Antiques on January 28-29, 2023.

The Two-Day Winter Fine Art, Antique, and Jewelry Auction will take place at the Knoxville Gallery, Knoxville, TN beginning at 9 AM Eastern Time on Saturday, January 28 and at 1 PM Eastern Time on Sunday, January 29.

This unsigned, undated work on paper has been assigned Lot No. 145.  It comes directly from the Beauford Delaney estate.  The subject of the portrait is unknown.

Portrait of a Man
Pastel on wove paper
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
Image courtesy of Case Antiques

 

This work fairly crackles with energy.  The subject's hair (head and face) is alive with irregular lines that evoke electrical current, and similar lines illuminate the dark garment that clothes the torso.

 

Portrait of a Man - detail (face)
Pastel on wove paper
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator

 Image courtesy of Case Antiques

 

Portrait of a Man - detail (neck and torso)
Pastel on wove paper
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator

 Image courtesy of Case Antiques

 

 

The mostly green background also sparkles with dots and irregular lines and the colors that Beauford chose to soften the background remind me of the aurora borealis.  

Portrait of a Man - detail (face and background)
Pastel on wove paper
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator

Image courtesy of Case Antiques

 

The estimated sale price of Portrait of a Man is $10,000 - $12,000.

For more information about the auction, click HERE.

Beauford's Man in African Dress in Cape Town

For what may be the first time, a Beauford Delaney work is on display on the African continent!

I plan to investigate this possibility further, but for now, suffice it to say that Beauford's Man in African Dress (ca. 1970) is being shown at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town, South Africa.

The exhibition entitled When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting opened on November 20, 2022.  (The title derives from Ava DuVernay's 2019 miniseries When They See Us.) The museum describes the show as exploring "how artists from Africa and the African diaspora have reimagined, repositioned, memorialised and asserted themselves throughout the 20th and 21st centuries..." 

Swiss-Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh says the show "places Black self-representation front and centre."

Beauford's Man in African Dress is on loan to the exhibition from the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery.*

 

Man in African Dress, c. 1970
Oil on canvas
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC
New York, NY

According to journalist Sean O'Toole's report in Wallpaper.com, it hangs near the midpoint of the exhibition and is "a fitting place to pause and draw one’s breath in preparedness for the thrilling surprises still to come." 

Find a Les Amis article that spotlights this painting HERE.

When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting will run through September 3, 2023. 

*Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC is Special Advisor and Representative of the Estate of Beauford Delaney.