I didn’t go to “In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney” expecting to see a love story.
A mentor to James Baldwin, a friend to Henry Miller and the subject of five separate Georgia O’Keeffe portraits, Delaney (1901-1979) is remembered as a prolific painter of many styles. In a career that included appearances in the Harlem Renaissance and the Greenwich Village scene, 26 years in Paris, and debilitating bouts of poverty and mental illness, he produced busy, jigsaw-puzzle street scenes that Miller called “mad with color”; glowing, somewhat sentimental portraits; and a broad range of colorful abstractions.
Like Baldwin, Delaney was the gay Black son of a preacher, in Delaney’s case one who traveled around the south from a base in Knoxville, Tenn. After studying art in Boston, with the help of an older painter, he made his way to New York, where he was robbed twice on his first night but determined to stay. There he made loving, slightly fantastical portraits of friends, acquaintances and important Black cultural figures. But though he drew them with confidence and care, you can see him yearning to ornament and exalt his subjects rather than just transcribe them.
The 81 works and eight original sketchbooks in this extremely beguiling show demonstrate that whatever was happening elsewhere in his life, the pulsing heart of Delaney’s work was the intimate, tantalizing, constantly deferred flirtation of color and line — something on clearest display in his drawings. There’s plenty of background information in the wall labels and catalog essays, but the emphasis here isn’t on biography or even on art historical argument, which is all to the good. It leaves more room to follow what’s actually happening on the paper.
Start with the line. Its confidence is unwavering, from the 1964 self-portrait in oil that opens the show to the pair of stunning self-portraits in ink on the second gallery’s back wall.
Thick black strokes outline Delaney’s head in the oil, and wiry black strokes his nostril; four broad brown lines become the bridge of his nose and one cheek. Between these lines and the general brown of his skin Delaney leaves plenty of white space, making himself look like an unfinished coloring book come to life. The drawings in the back, dating just a bit later, are so stripped down and powerful that they clang like brass.
In the earlier one, a thick, springy swath of ink contours Delaney’s head with such taut precision and force that you can practically feel the convex volume of his skull between your hands. The excess loops of his eyes are both literal and figurative, conveying shape, position and quality of movement all at once. In the later, less fanciful drawing, Delaney gives his eyes and lips over-large outlines, as if he had laid the paper over his face and simply traced them. They’re simultaneously real and exaggerated, ordinary and heightened.
But that confidence isn’t unmixed. As far back as a 1945 pastel of Baldwin, you can see Delaney’s line yearning to ornament and exalt his friend rather than just transcribe him — to become, in other words, more like his unconstrained colors. Around large eyes and faintly smiling lips, Baldwin’s expression comes alive with linear swooshes of pink, yellow and green.
In a long gallery to the side, full of ephemera like a polite note in Georgia O’Keeffe’s weird handwriting, you can watch Delaney’s pen slip busily around the faces of friends and acquaintances in thumbnail sketches, impatiently adding extra squiggles and loops. In other ink drawings Delaney’s lines curl and multiply without containing recognizable shapes at all. A group of five from the mid-1950s are abstract calligraphy, or a very conceptual rainstorm. A van Gogh-like 1962 self portrait, hanging right alongside the clanging drawings, demonstrates how the same effect translates to figuration: Wearing a dark beret against a red background, Delaney is covered in golden calligraphic strokes that look like flower petals floating in a pool of linseed oil.
What characterizes those colors that the line is so enamored of? It’s their strange mix of diffidence and intensity. In the 1945 painting “Untitled (Traffic Signals),” one of his jigsawlike paintings in which they’re still locked between hard borders, the colors are so saturated that it’s almost hard to make out the picture. In two untitled pastel portraits from around 1930 and 1940, Delaney places figures against electric-blue backgrounds so vibrant that they draw attention away from the faces. The hues, on the other hand, are a little off center, not dramatic like an expressionist’s but always chosen with a whiff of fantasy.
The best works in the show are those in which line and color finally meet — a series of gouaches and watercolors that Delaney began making after a 1961 breakdown. He called them his “Rorschach tests.” In one untitled example from 1961, a tumultuous purple shadow, surrounded by more purple wisps, hunches across a sheet of paper as if struggling against some force trying to thin it out. In another, from 1963, a two and a half foot-tall sheet of Arches paper tall is entirely filled with wriggly lines. They are a bright, almost rosy red; a clear dark green; tea-colored; and a variety of grays and blue-blacks. Around the sheet’s edges runs a muddy greenish mix. These lines overlap one another so much, and their edges are so cloudy and loose, that they hardly look like lines at all: They’re pretty much pure color.
In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney
Through Sept. 14, The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, Manhattan. 212-219-2166; (212) 219-2166; drawingcenter.org.
Will Heinrich writes about new developments in contemporary art, and has previously been a critic for The New Yorker and The New York Observer.
The post In Beauford Delaney’s Luminous Watercolors, Color Flirts With Line appeared first on New York Times.
