The Drawing Center presents a vibrant retrospective of Beauford Delaney, an artist whose life and work traversed continents, styles, and emotional landscapes. Born in the segregated South, Delaney eventually found his way to New York and then Paris, where he evolved from a figurative portraitist into a bold abstract painter. Along the way, he cultivated friendships with some of the most influential cultural figures of the 20th century, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Norman Lewis, and James Baldwin. His art reflects not only technical evolution but also a deep spiritual engagement with light, color, and identity. Despite personal struggles and mental health challenges later in life, Delaney’s work remained luminous, expressive, and emotionally charged. This exhibition captures the many facets of his artistic journey, offering viewers a rare glimpse into the mind of a visionary who lived through art as much as he created it.

Delaney’s early years were shaped by the harsh realities of the Jim Crow South, where he was born into a family deeply rooted in faith and resilience. His mother, once enslaved, and his father, a preacher and barber, instilled in him a sense of purpose and creativity that would guide his path. Encouraged by a white mentor who recognized his talent, Delaney left Tennessee for Boston to study art formally. From there, he moved to New York in 1929, arriving at a time when Harlem was still echoing with the sounds of its Renaissance. Though not a central figure in that movement, he became part of its extended orbit, mingling with artists like Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden.

In New York, Delaney honed his skills as a portraitist, blending academic precision with vivid Fauvist colors. He drew inspiration from the city’s nightlife, capturing the energy of jazz clubs and bustling streets. His style shifted under the influence of contemporaries such as Stuart Davis, leading him toward more surreal interpretations of urban life. But it was his meeting with James Baldwin in 1940 that marked a turning point. The young Baldwin, just fifteen at the time, found in Delaney a mentor and surrogate father. For Delaney, Baldwin became both muse and confidant, inspiring a series of striking portraits that captured the writer’s youthful intensity and inner depth.

As the postwar art world gravitated toward New York, Delaney chose instead to follow Baldwin to Paris in 1953. There, removed from the pressures of American trends and rivalries, his work underwent a dramatic transformation. Freed from representational constraints, he embraced abstraction, using color and light to convey emotion and transcendence. Works like “Abstract Circles” (c. 1956) and various untitled pieces from the early 1960s reveal a fascination with radiant fields of color, evoking natural phenomena and spiritual states. In Clamart, a quiet suburb outside Paris, Delaney painted with newfound clarity and freedom, producing works that Paul Jenkins likened to “churches of no denomination.”

Despite this creative flourishing, Delaney faced growing personal turmoil. Financial instability, loneliness, and mental health issues began to take their toll. In 1961, during a planned trip to Greece, he experienced a breakdown, abandoning ship en route and ending up in a series of psychiatric institutions. Yet even in these difficult years, his artistic impulse did not wane. Paintings like the 1963 “Untitled” shimmer with psychedelic intensity, suggesting a struggle against despair transformed into visual poetry. Baldwin, who witnessed Delaney’s decline, described him as a man of unyielding spirit—someone who never bowed despite being shaken and broken. The legacy of Beauford Delaney is one of courage, vision, and the enduring power of art to illuminate even the darkest corners of human experience.