In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney

The Drawing Center is pleased to present an exhibition featuring works on paper by the American artist Beauford Delaney (1901–1979). Entitled In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney, it will be the first comprehensive Delaney exhibition at a New York museum in over three decades, and the first-ever exhibition devoted to drawing—the medium that was central to his oeuvre.

Delaney holds a place in the history of American art of the postwar period that is challenging to define. Born in 1901 in Knoxville, Tennessee, he grew up in the segregated South and studied fine art at the Massachusetts Normal School in Boston in the late 1920s. By 1929, he had moved to New York, where he continued his artistic practice at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, producing realistic portraits and cubist-inflected street scenes of the Greenwich Village neighborhood where he lived. In 1953, at the urging of his friend, James Baldwin, Delaney moved to Paris, the city where he would spend the rest of his life. In Paris, Delaney drew and painted portraits, while at the same time, he developed an all-over calligraphic abstract painting style. For two decades, he painted abstract and figurative works simultaneously, sometimes combining both languages by inserting barely visible figures into abstract compositions, or by working up backgrounds full of abstract incidence that often competed with the fully realized portraits embedded within them. Delaney produced drawings from the beginning of his career in the early 1920s in Knowxville, until his mental illness prevented him from continuing in the early 1970s. Although he rarely drew preparatory sketches, his works on paper closely followed techniques and motifs he used in his paintings.

For Delaney, drawing was both a sanctuary and a space of experimentation where he could explore ideas with greater spontaneity—but this vital area of his oeuvre has received little attention. In the Medium of Life will include approximately 90 drawings, gouaches, pastels and notebook sketches marking distinct periods of Delaney’s career. The exhibition will also include several works on canvas and a detailed display of ephemera—documentary photographs, correspondence, exhibition brochures, and press clippings—compiled with the goal of providing a biographical backdrop for Delaney’s artmaking practice.