Urban Legends

URBAN LEGENDS By: Sarah M. Booher

Garza Law Firm, PLLC

ABIDING LOVE OF MANKIND: BEAUFORD DELANEY AND THE ART OF CRITICAL EXILE

Rev. Renee Kesler announced in January of this year that the first residential building at the new downtown Smokies Stadium will be named after Knoxville-native Beauford Delaney1. Said the Beck Cultural Exchange president, “Delaney is by far the most important artist of the 20th century; his influence on the world of art cannot be overstated2.”

Originally a resident of “The Bottom,”3 Beauford Delaney was born in Knoxville in 1901 to a Methodist minister and a mother who had been born a slave in Virginia4. His mother’s talent as a singer and a quilter fostered a love of the arts in her children5. The eighth of ten children, only four of whom would survive to adulthood, Beauford first learned to draw as a child copying pictures from Sunday school cards and the family bible6. By age 14, he had completed his first commissioned painting7 .

Not long after, prominent local artist, Lloyd Branson, discovered him painting signs and mentored him before financing his move to Boston8. He studied there for a few years before moving to New York City, just days after the stock market crash9. His first one-man show occurred just a year later at the New York Public Library; he soon gained wide recognition for the precise realism in his pastel portraits of well-known African Americans, such as W.E.B. DuBois and Duke Ellington10 .

In Greenwich Village, Beauford formed close friendships with playwright Henry Miller, author James Baldwin, and artist Georgia O’Keeffe11. Professionally, he cemented his position among the innovators of the Harlem Renaissance. By the late 1940s, his paintings were primarily large street scenes of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, featuring broad areas of pure, bright color12. A private benefactor financed his first trip to Europe in 1953, but Delaney only made it as far as Paris13 . Enchanted with the city and buoyed by Parisian racial equality, he settled in and spent the rest of his life there14 .

Influenced primarily by the techniques of Van Gogh, the color of the Fauves, and the design principles of abstract expressionism, Delaney’s works were never “merely derivatives of previous styles15.” Instead, he created a lyrically expressive style that drew upon his love of music and his improvisational use of color. It was this bold divergence in styles that kept him isolated in the art community, a darling of the international culture scene, but never at center stage16. And as the apparent joy in his abstract expressionist art increased, he himself sank deeper and deeper into turmoil17 .

Delaney’s mental health issues and alcohol abuse eventually began to significantly overwhelm his life. It is believed he likely suffered from schizophrenia18. Periods of lucidity would be interrupted with madness, paranoia, and hallucinations, and he attempted suicide in the late 1960s19 . He died in 1979 in Paris at St. Anne’s Hospital for the Insane20. James Baldwin wrote of Delaney, “great art can only be created out of love” and that “no greater lover has ever held a brush21.”

In 2009, writer and expat Monique Wells established “Les Amis de Beauford Delaney22.” The organization and online memorial site raised funds to preserve Delaney’s grave at the Parisian Cemetery of Thiais, erect a headstone, and install historical plaques in his honor at Rue d’Odessa and Les Mille Colonnes23 .

The Knoxville Museum of Art already owned pieces by Joseph Delaney, Beauford’s accomplished painter brother, but a growing market appreciation for Beauford’s work and no personal will made it initially very difficult for the museum to procure pieces in their own collection24 . However, they were finally able to acquire two of his watercolors in 2014, purchase his “Scattered Light” painting in 2015, and added a 1933 portrait of their mother to the permanent collection in 201525. The Museum also houses Beauford’s personal archives. Although the KMA is now home to the largest Beauford Delaney collection, his works can be found across America, including two Smithsonian Museums, the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Studio Museum in Harlem26 .

Said Stephen Wicks, KMA’s curator, “It would be great for young people here to view Beauford as East Tennessee’s Picasso. My hope is Beauford Delaney is the beginning of a larger story of the Delaney family in Knoxville. They had an important role here that would inspire generations27.”

1 Melanie Vásquez Russell, 1st Residential Building at Knoxville Stadium to Honor Artist Beauford Delaney, WATE (Jan. 24, 2022, 11:19 AM), https://www.wate.com/ news/1st-residential-building-at-knoxville-stadium-to-honor-artist-beauforddelaney/. 2 Id. 3 Id. 4 Eve MacNeill, Beauford Delaney: Biography, THE ART STORY (Dec. 15, 2018), https://www.theartstory.org/artist/delaney-beauford/life-and-legacy/#biography_ header. 5 Id. 6 Id. 7 Id. 8 Black History Month Artist Spotlight: Beauford Delaney, ARROWMONT SCHOOL OF ARTS AND CRAFTS (Feb. 4, 2021), https://www.arrowmont.org/black-historymonth-artist-spotlight-beauford-delaney/#:~:text=Beauford%20gradually%20 succumbed%20to%20alcoholism,man%20could%20be%20an%20artist. 9 Beauford Delaney, SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, https://www. americanart.si.edu/artist/beauford-delaney-1186 (last visited Mar. 9, 2022); MacNeill, supra note 4. 10 Id. 11 MacNeill, supra note 4. 12 Smithsonian American Art Museum, supra note 9. 13 Id. 14 Id. 15 Id. 16 Jake Cigainero, Beauford Delaney Returns to the Scene, THE NEW YORK TIMES (Sep. 8, 2016), https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/arts/international/beauforddelaney-returns-to-the-scene.html. 17 MacNeill, supra note 4. 18 Cigainero, supra note 16. 19 Id. 20 Id. 21 Id. 22 Id. 23 Cigainero, supra note 16. 24 Id. 25 Id. 26 Id. 27 Id.