Beauford Delaney

I love the color in both of these paintings.  They are both from 1946.   The top painting is called Can Fire in the Park and the second is titled Jazz Quartet.   The artist for both is Beauford Delaney.   While both paintings have the same colorful style both represent different situations – one being the downtrodden and the other depicting the wonderful contribution Jazz has made to the American music scene.

Beauford Delaney was an American Modernist who hailed from the South but worked in New York and later Paris.   He studied art in Boston and was introduced to black activism through people like Butler Wilson a board member for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Delaney loved living in New York City among people from various ethnic backgrounds.   His subjects were the people he saw all around him in parks and cafes yet his work doesn’t depict a vision of life in the city.   It’s more than that.   Delaney’s work shows what it FELT like to live in the city.   While living in America’s greatest city Delaney worked as a bellhop and janitor.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum describes Can Fire in the Park as a disturbing contemporary vignette [which] conveys a legacy of deprivation linked not only to the depression years after 1929 but also to the longstanding disenfranchisement of black American portrayed as social outcasts.

Style portrays musical rhythms and bold color use “hovers between representation and abstraction”

The biography, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beaford Delaney written by David Leeming states he led a very compartmentalized life and was rather isolated.   He had friends but managed to keep much of his life private.   He lived in Greenwich Village and had many white friends yet he also fit in with Harlem because of his ethnicity.   Most certainly due to the times he kept his homosexuality secret.

Beauford Delaney moved to Paris in 1953 where his work finally evolved into abstract expressionism.