Beauford Delaney collection

1964-1979

Beauford Delaney was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the third child of the Reverend Samuel Delaney and Delia Johnson Delaney. He attended the Knoxville Colored School and later studied art with an elderly Knoxville artist, who encouraged him to get further training. In 1924 Delaney went to Boston where he studied at the Massachusetts Normal School and the South Boston School of Art, and attended evening classes at the Copley Society.

Delaney went to New York in 1929, settling at first in Harlem. He painted society women and professional dancers at Billy Pierce's dancing school on West 46th Street, which gained him a reputation as a portraitist. His first one-man show, which consisted of five pastels and ten charcoal drawings, was at the 135th Street Branch Library of the New York Public Library in 1930. During the same year three of his portraits were included in a group show at the Whitney Studio Galleries, the predecessor of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Delaney also taught part-time at a progressive school in Greenwich Village.

By the late 1940s Beauford Delaney had become a significant figure on the art scene. He illustrated "Unsung Americans Sung" (1944), a book of black musical tributes edited by W.C. Handy; he had a series of one-man shows in New York and Washington, D.C.; and he exhibited in group shows in a number of other cities. In 1945 he showed his first series of portraits of writers Henry Miller and James Baldwin, who would become his lifelong friends. In 1949 he began an association with the Roko Gallery in New York, where he exhibited annually until 1953.

In 1953 Delaney left New York with the intention of settling in Rome, but a visit to Paris turned into a permanent stay. He had two studios in Paris, the first in the suburbs of Clamart and the other in the Rue Vincingetorix. In Paris Delaney exhibited in one-man and group shows at the Gallerie Paul Fachetti (1960), the Centre Culturel Americain (1961 and 1972), the Galerie Lambert (1964), the Musee Galliera (1967) and the Galerie Darthea Speyer (1973), among other places. The latter was a major showing of a selection of his work from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s and the catalog contained tributes by James Jones, James Baldwin, and Georgia O'Keefe. Delaney also exhibited in England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United States. The Paris years saw the creation of several masterpieces including portraits of singer Marian Anderson and writer Jean Genet. During this period he also created a series of interiors and studies in watercolor.

After suffering two nervous breakdowns, Delaney was institutionalized, and died on March 26, 1979 at St. Ann's Hospital in Paris. Delaney's last one-man show in the United States was at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1978, inaugurating that museum's Black Masters Series. Delaney's work is in several private collections and in the collections of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Newark Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art.