Beauford Delaney Papers - UT Special Collections MS.3967: Resources

Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door examines the thirty-eight-year relationship between painter Beauford Delaney (born in Knoxville, 1901; died in Paris, 1979) and writer James Baldwin (born in New York, 1924; died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, 1987) and the ways their ongoing intellectual exchange shaped each other's creative output and worldview. This full-color publication documents the groundbreaking exhibition organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art (KMA) and is drawn from the KMA's extensive Delaney holdings, from public and private collections around the country, and from unpublished photographs and papers held by the Knoxville-based estate of Beauford Delaney. This book seeks to identify and disentangle the skein of influences that grew over and around a complex, lifelong relationship with a selection of Delaney's works that reflects the powerful presence of Baldwin in Delaney's life. While no other figure in Beauford Delaney's extensive social orbit approaches James Baldwin in the extent and duration of influence, none of the major exhibitions of Delaney's work has explored in any depth the creative exchange between the two.             The volume also includes essays by Mary Campbell, whose research currently focuses on James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney within the context of the civil rights movement; Glenn Ligon, an internationally acclaimed New York-based artist with intimate knowledge of Baldwin's writings, Delaney's art, and American history and society; Levi Prombaum, a curatorial assistant at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum who did his doctoral research at University College London on Delaney's portraits of James Baldwin; and Stephen Wicks, the Knoxville Museum of Art's Barbara W. and Bernard E. Bernstein Curator, who has guided the KMA's curatorial department for over 25 years and was instrumental in building the world's largest and most comprehensive public collection of Beauford Delaney's art at the KMA.  

Over the course of a thirty-eight-year friendship, painter Beauford Delaney and writer James Baldwin shared their private lives and shaped one another's artistic values. Speculative Light brings together scholars, critics, and artists who analyze the stylistic and historical import of Delaney's and Baldwin's works and examine how this friendship fundamentally shaped the pair's ideas about art and life. The book's contributors explore how the two men, sharing identities as queer Black American artists, first in New York and then as expatriates in France, created a speculative space in their work to think about more just and creative Black futures. Essay topics and issues range from masculinity, queerness, Blackness, and Americanness to the relationship between jazz, painting, and writing. Throughout, the contributors establish a positive history for Delaney's and Baldwin's arts that refuses a subordinate role to white artists of the modernist avant-garde. Ultimately, Speculative Light demonstrates that Delaney and Baldwin's bond provides revolutionary grounds for theorizing contemporary Black art and life. Contributors. Hilton Als, Nicholas Boggs, Indie A. Choudhury, Shawn Anthony Christian, Rachel Cohen, Amy J. Elias, Monika Gehlawat, David Leeming, D. Quentin Miller, Fred Moten, Walton M. Muyumba, Robert O'Meally, Ed Pavlić, Levi Prombaum, Robert Reid-Pharr, Tyler T. Schmidt, Abbe Schriber, Jered Sprecher, Stephen C. Wicks, Magdalena Zaborowska

Winner of the 2022 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize Fraternal Light: On Painting While Black is a lyric evocation of the life and work of the great African American artist Beauford Delaney. These poems pay homage to Delaney's resilience and ingenuity in the face of profound adversity. Although his work never garnered the acclaim it deserves--and is finally receiving--Delaney was well known and highly respected in African American cultural circles, among bohemian writers and artists based in Greenwich Village from the 1930s to the early 1950s, and in Parisian avant-garde and expatriate enclaves from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s. Drawn to Delaney's painting and personal history through her emotional response to his work, especially his portraits, Arlene Keizer has crafted a diasporic ceremony of remembrance for this Black, gay male visionary. Fraternal Light offers back an answering complexity to Delaney's life and work. One form of art calls out; another answers. Keizer's poems make the contours and challenges of Delaney's life visible, which is especially urgent in a world still frequently hostile or indifferent to Black creative brilliance.

In honor of the centennial of Beauford Delaney's birth, An Artistic Friendship examines the close artistic and personal friendship between two important American artists of the twentieth century, Beauford Delaney and Lawrence Calcagno. An unlikely pair, the two became friends in Paris in the early 1950s and remained close over the next twenty years until Delaney's deteriorating mental health removed him from his orbit of friends and family. Delaney (1901-79), a black American from Knoxville, Tennessee, spent most of his mature life as an expatriate artist in Paris. Lawrence Calcagno (1913-93), a white American from northern California, spent much of his peripatetic career in the United States and in Europe in search of a place to call home. But Delaney and Calcagno had many things in common. Both men committed themselves wholeheartedly to lyrical abstraction, though Delaney's work was ultimately influenced more by Claude Monet's fluid water-lily paintings than by the color-field painters so important in Calcagno's formation as an artist. Both men shared an interest in the philosophical underpinnings of their abstract work. Calcagno's abstract "landscapes of the mind"--with their recognizable and consistent horizons--derived in part from the artist's sense of the universal, yet mysterious harmony of nature. For Delaney, abstraction gave form to the "higher power" of light in the world, a light that, according to his close friend James Baldwin, "held the power to illuminate, even to redeem and reconcile and heal." Both men experienced the power of melancholia (in Delaney's case, the debilitating effects of mental illness), and both understood well the social isolation accompanying their homosexuality.

An American modernist painter during his New York years, Beauford Delaney (1901-79) produced engaging portraits, landscapes, and abstractions celebrated for their brilliance and technical complexity. This book explores Delaney's dramatic stylistic shift from figurative compositions of New York life to abstract expressionist studies of color and light following his move to Paris in 1953.A generous selection of paintings illuminates some of Delaney's most innovative years and firmly places his work among the dominant art movements of the day. Essays explore the phases of Delane's creative output, including an overview of the personal, societal, and art historical contexts in which Delaney lived and worked in New York and Paris. Also addressed are the artist's earlier Parisian works--few ever exhibited or reproduced--that visually bridge the transformation from his New York style to the Parisian works after 1960.

James Baldwin was one of the great writers of the last century. In works that have become part of the American canon--Go Tell It on a Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen--he explored issues of race and racism in America, class distinction, and sexual difference. A gay, African American writer who was born in Harlem, he found the freedom to express himself living in exile in Paris. When he returned to America to cover the Civil Rights movement, he became an activist and controversial spokesman for the movement, writing books that became bestsellers and made him a celebrity, landing him on the cover of Time. In this biography, which Library Journal called "indispensable," David Leeming creates an intimate portrait of a complex, troubled, driven, and brilliant man. He plumbs every aspect of Baldwin's life: his relationships with the unknown and the famous, including painter Beauford Delaney, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and childhood friend Richard Avedon; his expatriate years in France and Turkey; his gift for compassion and love; the public pressures that overwhelmed his quest for happiness, and his passionate battle for black identity, racial justice, and to "end the racial nightmare and achieve our country." Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.