Beauford Delaney:

The Abstract Expressionism of Otherness

Christian Weaver

Dr. Neal

ARTH 226-01

Fall 2021
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Historically, the work of Beauford Delaney is associated with both the Harlem

Renaissance and Abstract Expressionism. However, due to his respective intersecting identities

as a queer, Black, impoverished, and mentally ill, he was often disassociated from or rejected by

either movement. This seemingly inescapable state of otherness and its progression are

exemplified not only in the timeline of Delaney’s life but also throughout his oeuvre. In

exploring the complexities of his personal identity, his work and legacy can be more deeply

understood and contextualized. In this essay and through the journey of Beauford Delaney’s

work, I will examine the value in viewing art through the lens of the artist’s personal identities––

for Delaney this was a lens of otherness––as opposed to the lens of associated art movements.

Born in 1901 the son of a Methodist minister, Beauford’s upbringing in Knoxville was

one defined by traditional, strict Christian values. His mother, Delia, encouraged her ten children

to value art and music, making a lasting impact on Beauford’s own interests in the arts. He and

his brother Joseph, another famous artist of the Harlem Renaissance, began painting signs

together in their hometown. 1 In 1923, Beauford left Knoxville for Boston to pursue a formal

education in art––attending the Copley Society, Massachusetts Normal School, and South

Boston School of Art. It is also in Boston that Beauford’s personal sociopolitical ideology began

to take shape, as new possibilities for Black Americans and artists were presented to him through

affiliation with many considerably radical and liberal young Bostonians. Beauford eventually

reached an educational threshold in Boston and moved to New York City in 1929 at the

intersection of two major life-altering eras in twentieth-century American life––the Great

Depression and The Harlem Renaissance. The inspiration he found in this time––both personally

1
Patricia Hinds, “The Delaney Brothers––New York and Paris,” Black Renaissance Noire 17, no. 2 (2017): 139.
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and professionally––would redefine his work and artistic notoriety. Through poverty and

oppression, Beauford discovered and expressed the light he saw in everything throughout New

York City. As his friend and eternal muse James Baldwin wrote of him: “I learned about light

from Beauford Delaney, the light contained in everything, in every surface, in every face…” 2

Although it’s difficult to find earlier works of Delaney’s from his time in New York

during the Harlem Renaissance, there is a distinctly noticeable shift from the portraits he was

painting in the early thirties––which were largely photorealistic like Portrait of Hudson (Figure

1) ––to his paintings after he moved to Greenwich Village in 1936. Greenwich Village became a

haven where Beauford began to understand and explore his sexuality in a way he couldn’t

amongst his peers in Harlem. Despite its central ideology being cultural and intellectual revival

for Black artists, Harlem was not as inviting to a homosexual like Beauford. Although his work

at this time still centered on themes of Black life, it did so in far more nuanced and abstract ways

than the works of Delaney’s contemporaries. As Eloise Johnson cites: “The implication is that

Delaney is an anomaly because he did not create agitprop art as Black artists were (and to some

extents, still are) expected to do.”3 Delaney was marginalized within an already marginalized

group––in Greenwich he was too black. In Harlem, he was too queer. He was othered, no matter

where he went. This sense of otherness began to express itself in works like Dark Rapture

(Figure 2), Greene Street (Figure 3), and Can Fire in the Park (Figure 4). These works explore

Black life, poverty, community, sexuality, and power through less traditional and more

expressionistic explorations of light. These abstractions and expressions of light could also serve

as insight into Delaney’s unraveling mind as well as the reality of his otherness. It is speculated

2
James Baldwin, “On the Artist Beauford Delaney,” Transition 18 (1965): 88.
3
Eloise Johnson, “Out of the Ashes: Cultural Identity and Marginalization in the Art of Beauford Delaney,” Notes in
the History of Art 24, no. 4 (2005): 46.
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that, because of the intricate nature of Delaney’s light-scapes, there is symbolism behind each

color expression. Bearing this in mind, it could also be argued that these symbolically rich

abstractions could’ve also been the sole outlet for the expression of his identity. Between the two

lives he was living in Greenwich Village and Harlem, his truest self could only exist in the

luminous colors and perception-challenging abstractions within his paintings. It is from the work

that he produced at this time, that he also began to be loosely associated with the Abstract

Expressionists.

In many ways, Beauford Delaney was an artist far ahead of his time, as many of his peers

acknowledged that he was producing works that would be considered abstract expressionism

before it was even a known movement. His visual language of symbols, signs, fire escapes, drain

grates, and colorful light-scapes exemplified the core values of abstract expressionism. However,

because his work still maintained pseudo-representational themes, he was not considered a part

of the movement by its associated artists. Additionally, abstract expressionism was a movement

dominated by the white, male, avant-garde of New York’s Lower East Side. Ann Eden Gibson’s

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics sheds light on how “white male artists of the New York

School believed great art erased the identity of its maker but couldn't sustain their claims when

confronted with art made by people who were different from them.” 4 Beauford’s race as well as

his sexuality would prove to further isolate him from the machismo of the movement, despite his

ever-progressive nonrepresentational painting style. This––along with the racist implications of

post-world war America––led Delaney to relocate to Paris in 1953 where his colleague Herbert

Gentry assured him: “You’ll never feel like an outsider again.” 5 While living in Paris, isolated

4
Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics. (Yale University Press, 1999).
5
Christopher Cappozzola, “Beauford Delaney and the Art of Exile,” The Gay & Lesbian Worldwide Review 5, no.10
(2003): 10.
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from his American contemporaries, and further isolated from the French natives due to the

language barrier, Delaney’s mental health began to suffer more and more, and his drinking

increased to the point of constant and utter incoherence. Despite all this, these years in Paris are

thought to be some of his most lucrative years as an artist––not so much in regard to accolades,

but surely in regard to the purity of abstraction in his work. As can be observed in works like

Composition 16 (Figure 5) and Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald (Figure 6), Delaney’s use of

abstraction reached newly untethered heights with vivacious and complex application of paint as

well as a luminous shade of yellow that holds the viewer hostage in a world unraveling. There is

a certain noticeable freedom to these works, in comparison to those he was producing back in

America. By the time Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald (Figure 6) was completed, Beauford’s

alcoholism and episodes of delusion were reportedly so unmanageable that most of the works he

sold at this time were done so thanks only to the orchestration of concerned friends and

caretakers who went out of their way to ensure his livelihood was maintained. He was living

mostly off favors and kindness. By 1975, his symptoms had become so unmanageable––with

him too often being found wandering naked in the streets of Paris––that he was admitted to St.

Anne’s psychiatric hospital where he would later pass away in the spring of 1979. And so, one of

the greatest American painters was laid to rest in a pauper’s grave in Paris––his true story left

untold, much of his work left behind with no preservation, a sad ending to a sad story about a

person who didn’t fit in anywhere he went outside of the canvas.

So often in art history, it becomes common place for scholars and students to associate an

artist with their respective movements and eras in an effort to compartmentalize our complex

visual timeline. What makes art history unique among historical scholarship and academia is that

it chronicles the innate human behavior of creation––it is a tangible and stimulating illustration
 Weaver 6

of our ever-evolving zeitgeist. By analyzing the personal identities of artists such as Beauford

Delaney, we can not only better understand individual oeuvre, but we may better understand

ourselves. Beauford Delaney’s work highlights the complexities of otherness, presenting an

opportunity to the viewer to find the light contained in everything––to consider and question

those social constructs that isolated him and continue to isolate the others of our own time. As

James Baldwin wrote of Delaney: “Perhaps I am so struck by the light in Beauford's paintings

because he comes from darkness-as I do; as, in fact, we all do. But the darkness of Beauford's

beginnings, in Tennessee, many years ago, was a black-blue midnight indeed, opaque, and full of

sorrow. And I do not know, nor will any of us ever really know, what kind of strength it was that

enabled him to make so dogged and splendid a journey.”6 Understanding what darkness existed

to cause Beauford Delaney to share his light with us gives new meaning to the shades of

luminous yellow he left behind where mere academic distinctions such as “Harlem Renaissance”

and "Abstract Expressionism” simply cannot.

6
James Baldwin, “On the Artist Beauford Delaney,” Transition 18 (1965): 88.
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Figure 1: Beauford Delaney, Portrait of Figure 2: Beauford Delaney. Dark

Figure 3: Beauford Delaney. Greene Street. 1940. Oil

Figure 4: Beauford Delaney. Can Fire in the Park. 1946. Oil on canvas.
24 x 30 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum (Smithsonian American
Art, americanart.si.edu/).
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Beauford Delaney. Composition 16. 1954 – 1956. Oil on canvas. 80 x 94 cm. (Museum of
Modern Art, www.moma.org/).
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Beauford Delaney. Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald. 1968.

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https://doi.org/10.2307/2935393.

Cappozzola, Christopher. “Beauford Delaney and the Art of Exile,” The Gay & Lesbian
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