The Paintings of African-American Artist Beauford Delaney Travel to Harvard's Fogg Art Museum
Exhibition is First Retrospective Exhibition of Delaney's Work in 25 Years
CAMBRIDGE, MA (February 3, 2003)-Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow presents the full range of Delaney's art, from the portraits and cityscapes he did in New York's Greenwich Village in the 1940s to the abstract work that followed his 1953 move to Paris, where he lived until his death in 1979. This exhibition of 26 paintings, organized by Atlanta's High Museum of Art with support for the national tour provided by MetLife Foundation, will be on view from February 15 through May 4, 2003, at Harvard's Sert Gallery in the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.
The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are the first to explore this African-American artist's use of the color yellow, which he employed as a pivotal symbolic and expressive element in both his figurative and abstract works. Delaney believed that the various hues held spiritual significance and that the color yellow represented light, healing, and redemption.
"The exhibition Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow is a wonderful demonstration of the Art Museums' desire to provide a meaningful, scholarly, and diverse experience for all our visitors," said Marjorie Cohn, acting director of the Harvard University Art Museums. "Through exhibitions organized by colleagues elsewhere, we fill gaps in our collections, so that the community becomes acquainted with important yet less familiar artists."
The color yellow made itself explicit in Delaney's art beginning in the 1940s in Greenwich Village. Washington Square-a well-known New York location reduced by Delaney to a play of mostly whites, yellows, blue, lavender, and a series of curving black outlines-is brazenly nonnaturalistic. And yet the vital life of the park is evoked by majestic trees, lounging park patrons, meandering animals, and the square's sprawling, European design. "Jazz and literature were lasting sources of inspiration for the artist," said Harry Cooper, curator of modern art at the Fogg Art Museum. "Delaney's portraits of Ella Fitzgerald, whose music captivated him in New York, and James Baldwin, whose close friendship eased Delaney's later years, are examples of his motivation to create art in spite of poverty and mental illness. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of his career is that while continuing to do portraits, he created a parallel body of thickly brushed radiantly abstract paintings."
A native of Knoxville, Tennessee, Delaney took lessons from a local artist before moving to Boston in 1924 to begin his formal training at several area schools, including the Massachusetts Normal Art School and the Copley Society. He moved in 1929 to New York City and immersed himself in the lively bohemian scene of Greenwich Village. It was Delaney's pastel portraits of ordinary people as well as notables like Duke Ellington and Marian Anderson that won the artist public acclaim and numerous exhibitions. For the remainder of the 1930s and '40s, Delaney was well known in the New York art world for his bold and experimental use of color. His art reflected both the Negro culture flowering around him and the message of French modernism, which he received through friends and mentors like the painter Stuart Davis and the photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
In 1953, Delaney traveled to Paris, fleeing racism in the United States and making the city his home for the remainder of his life. He joined a community of artists and writers in that city that included Baldwin, Henry Miller, Sam Francis, and Bob Thompson. Delaney increasingly moved away from figuration to explore the emotional power of abstraction, producing an extensive body of work in watercolor and oil on canvas. Plagued in the 1960s and '70s by schizophrenia and alcoholism, Delaney was frequently hospitalized, reducing his output although his paintings were featured in many exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Delaney died in 1979 one year after a first retrospective of his work at the Studio Museum in Harlem.
"He has been starving and working all of his life -- in Tennessee, in Boston, in New York, and now in Paris. He has been menaced more than any other man I know by his social circumstances and also by all the emotional and psychological stratagems he has been forced to use to survive; and more than any other man I know, he has transcended both the inner and the outer darkness." - James Baldwin, 1964
Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow was organized by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and was curated by Richard J. Powell, Duke University. The exhibition has already appeared at the High Museum of Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Anacostia Museum and Center for African History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. The Fogg Art Museum is the final venue on the exhibition's national tour.
Additional funding for this presentation was provided by the Judith Rothschild Foundation.
Exhibition Catalogue
A 64-page catalogue, published by the High Museum of Art, accompanies the exhibition. The catalogue includes an essay written by guest curator Richard J. Powell and a poem by Richard A. Long and will retail at the Harvard Art Museum Gift Shop for $15.95.
Exhibition Programming
The Color of Ecstasy
Thursday, February 27
Arthur M. Sackler Lecture Hall
6 p.m.
Free admission
Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History, Duke University
Gallery Talks
Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow
Saturday, March 1, 11:30 a.m.
Sunday, April 27, 2 p.m.
Sert Gallery, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
Harry Cooper, curator of modern art, Fogg Art Museum
About the Harvard University Art Museums
The Harvard University Art Museums are one of the world's leading arts institutions, with the Arthur M. Sackler, Busch-Reisinger, and Fogg art museums, the Straus Center for Conservation, and the U.S. headquarters for the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, an excavation project in western Turkey.
The Harvard University Art Museums are distinguished by the range and depth of their collections, their groundbreaking exhibitions, and the original research of their staff. As an integral part of the Harvard community, the three art museums serve as a resource for all students, adding a special dimension to their areas of study. The public is welcome to experience the collections and exhibitions as well as to enjoy lectures, symposia, and other programs.
For more than a century, the Harvard University Art Museums have been the nation's premier training ground for museum professionals and scholars and are renowned for their role in the development of the discipline of art history in this country.
Location and Hours
The Fogg Art Museum and the Busch-Reisinger Museum are located at 32 Quincy Street in Cambridge. The Arthur M. Sackler Museum is located next door at 485 Broadway. Each Museum is a short walk from the Harvard Square MBTA station.
Hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., Sunday 1 - 5 p.m.; the Museums are closed on national holidays. Admission is $6.50; $5 for seniors; $5 for students; and free for those under 18 years of age. The Museums are free to everyone Saturday mornings, 10 a.m. - noon. The Harvard University Art Museums receive support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. More detailed information is available at 617-495-9400 or on the Internet at www.artmuseums.harvard.edu.
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For more information on this appointment or the Harvard University Art Museums, please contact:
Matthew Barone
Harvard University Art Museums
tel 617-495-2397; fax 617-496-9762
mbarone@fas.harvard.edu
or
Kim Gilbert/Allison Derusha
Resnicow Schroeder Associates
tel 212-671-5157; fax 212-595-8354
kgilbert@resnicowschroeder.com
aderusha@resnicowschroeder.com