His arrival in New York City at the time of the
Harlem Renaissance was exciting. Harlem was then the centre of black cultural life in the United States. But it was also the time of the “
Great Depression” and it was this that Beauford was confronted with on his arrival. ”Went to New York in 1929 from Boston all alone with very little money…this was the depression, and I soon discovered that most of these people were people out of work and just doing what I was doing – sitting and figuring out what to do for food and a place to sleep.”
Delaney felt an immediate affinity with this “multitude of people of all races – spending every night of their lives in parks and cafes” surviving on next to nothing. Their courage and shared camaraderie inspired him to feel that “somehow, someway there was something I could manage if only with some stronger force of will I could find the courage to surmount the terror and fear of this immense city and accept everything insofar as possible with some calm and determination”.
Members of this disenfranchised community became the subjects of many of Delaney’s greatest New York period paintings. In New York “he painted colourful, engaging canvasses that captured scenes of the urban landscape…his works from that period express, in an American Modernist vein, not only the character of the city, but also his personal vision of equality, love, and respect among all people”.
One of Delaney’s works from this period,
Can Fire in the Park (oil on canvas, 1946), where a group of men huddle together for warmth and companionship around an open fire, is described by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as a “disturbingly 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 Americans, portrayed here as social outcasts… Despite its sober subject, the scene crackles with energy, the culmination of Delaney’s sharp pure colors, thickly applied paints, and taught, schematic patterning. Abandoning the precise
realism of his early academic training, Delaney developed a lyrically expressive style that drew upon his love of musical rhythms and his improvisational use of color.” Works such as
Can Fire in the Park “hover between representation and abstraction as that style evolved during the 1940s.”
Delaney would eventually obtain work as a bellhop, and later as a telephone operator, doorman, caretaker, and janitor. He also managed to find “little corners in the world of the Great Depression that would or could be receptive to his work.”
In time, Delaney would establish himself as a well known part of the
bohemianism of the art scene of the period. His friends included the “poet laureate” of the period,
Countee Cullen, and he would also become the “spiritual father” to the young writer James Baldwin, and friends with artist
Georgia O’Keeffe, writer
Henry Miller and many others.
Despite the friendships and successes of this period, he remained a rather isolated individual. David Leeming, in his 1998 biography
Amazing Grace: a life of Beauford Delaney, presents Delaney as having led a very “compartmentalized” life in New York.
In
Greenwich Village, where his studio was, Delaney became part of a gay bohemian circle of mainly white friends; but he was furtive and rarely comfortable with his sexuality.
When he traveled to Harlem to visit his African-American friends and colleagues, Delaney made efforts to ensure that they knew little of his other social life in Greenwich Village. He feared that many of his Harlem friends would be uncomfortable or repelled by his
homosexuality.
He had ‘a third life’ centered around questions concerning the
aesthetics and development of modernism in Europe and the United States; primarily influenced by the ideas of his friends the photographer
Alfred Stieglitz and the
cubist artist
Stuart Davis (painter), and the paintings of the European modernists and their predecessors like
Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso and
Van Gogh.
The pressures of being “black and gay in a racist and
homophobic society” would have been difficult enough – but Delaney’s own
Christian upbringing and ‘disapproval’ of homosexuality, the presence of a family member (his artist brother Joseph) in the New York art scene and the “macho abstract expressionists emerging in lower Manhattan’s art scene” added to this pressure. So he “remained rather isolated as an artist even as he worked in a center of major artistic ferment… A deeply introverted and private person, Delaney formed no lasting romantic relationships.”
While he worked to incorporate African-American influences, such as the “
Negro” idiom of
jazz, into his own artwork, he often preferred to visit one of the clubs when he was in Harlem rather than join in the serious socio-political discussions or “Negro art” questions that were taking place at the
306 Group or the
Harlem Artists Guild. Though he resisted thinking of himself as a Negro artist, Beauford had tremendous pride in black achievement. He was also pleased to participate in a number of black artists exhibitions with fellow artists like
Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Selma Burke, Richmond Barthe, Norman Lewis and his brother Joseph Delaney.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum notes that "neither early success nor gracious spirit spared Delaney from the obscurity and poverty" that plagued most of his adult life.
Brooks Atkinson wrote in his 1951 book
Once Around the Sun, "No one knows exactly how Beauford lives. Pegging away at a style of painting that few people understand or appreciate, he has disciplined himself, not only physically but spiritually, to live with a kind of personal magnetism in a barren world."
Delaney’s paintings seem to say, "I may be suffering, but what an experience this is". Delaney’s work "is never depressing, though Beauford was often depressed; he could say yes to life in spite of the fact that life was kicking him in the ass."
