The new edition of David Leeming's biography about Beauford—Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney—was released by Karma Books on January 7, 2025 (three weeks later than the December 17, 2024 date that was originally projected).
I pre-ordered my copy well before the end of 2024 and was excited to receive it just a few days ago. I wanted to compare my tattered, thoroughly annotated first edition (Oxford University Press, 1998) with this new version in anticipation of my upcoming visit to Knoxville to peruse the Beauford Delaney Papers that the University of Tennessee Libraries made available to researchers as of January 2024.
I was somewhat taken aback when I read the following in Leeming's foreword:
Given the many meticulously researched exhibition catalogues produced in the last twenty years as well as what is sure to be a comprehensive account of his life from Dr. [Mary] Campbell, Amazing grace is reprinted here without any changes in the original text.
But I was gratified to read that the papers Leeming consulted to write the book are now held at UTLibraries.
This long awaited reprint is graced by a laudatory and intensely personal introduction by Hilton Als, who explains his familiarity with Leeming's writings and describes Leeming's treatment of Beauford's life story as "transcend[ing] the limitations of biography to create a historical narrative of huge scope based on Delaney's vulnerable mind and body."
Als mentions three Beauford Delaney works in his introduction—Portrait of a Young Man (ca. 1937-1940), Dark Rapture (1941), and Abstraction No. 9 (ca. 1963)—and provides his take on the emotions Beauford might have experienced in creating them.
An image of Dark Rapture can be found on page 123 of Amazing Grace.
(1941) Oil on masonite
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
Unfortunately, images of the other two works are not presented in the book.
(ca. 1937-1940) Color pastel crayons
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
(circa 1963) Oil on canvas
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator
Image courtesy of the Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina
On the last page of his introduction, Als claims Beauford as the brother he's always felt him to be.
Aside from a higher page count in the new book, there are several differences between the first and second editions of Amazing Grace that will be of interest for readers who wish to approach Beauford's life and art from a scholarly perspective:
1) While there are chapter headers at the top margin of the pages in the first edition, there are none in the second edition.
2) Detail in black and white photos is better discerned in the first edition.
3) Color representations of Beauford's art (now on individual pages) are brighter and more vivid in the second edition.
4) There are six fewer references cited in the bibliography of the second edition.
5) Importantly, the second edition has no index. Anyone who does not have the first edition of the book will be hard pressed to find specific information in the reprinted version.
