Exhibition Walkthrough: In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney

Rebecca DiGiovanna:
Welcome to In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Rebecca DiGiovanna, I'm one of the assistant curators here and one of the co-organizers of this exhibition, along with our executive director, Laura Hopman. And I thought an appropriate place for us to begin with this tour is with the exhibition title itself, In the Medium of Life. Laura [Hoptman] and I drew inspiration for this title from a letter that the American author, Henry Miller, wrote on behalf of Beauford Delaney, it was titled A Few Words of Homage to the Unforgettable Beauford Delaney, and he wrote it as part of a tribute to Beauford's 1969 American cultural retrospective. This was considered his first Parisian retrospective, although it was a single night celebration, and he would have a more comprehensive retrospective at Darthea Speyer Gallery in 1973, just four years later.

In this letter, Henry Miller writes of Beauford: "You are the artist through and through, not just in the medium of paint, but in the medium of life, which is more important." And Laura and I just felt like this sentiment was so appropriate for this exhibition, because as those of you who have had an opportunity to walk around have seen, Beauford really does not abide by any particular style, or motif, or even place or person for very long, he's always revisiting and reconfiguring and reworking things that he's done from an earlier period, and so we just thought that the true through-line of this exhibition is really just how full and vibrant and textured and varied a life Beauford Delaney led, despite all the adversity that he faced.

It might be appropriate for me to give you just a little bit of a biographical backdrop for those of you who do not know Delaney. He was born in the Jim Crow South in 1901, in Knoxville, Tennessee. He was raised by Delia Delaney, who was a seamstress, who was also born into slavery, and the Reverend Samuel Delaney, who was a barber and an itinerant Methodist Episcopal preacher, whose ministry took the Delaneys all across the Southern Appalachians. He was one of 10 children, most of whom did not survive into adulthood, and I would say that the young Beauford really found early self-expression and solace in drawing. He and his brother, Joseph Delaney, who was an accomplished figurative painter, they would spend their mornings during their father's sermons, sketching on the backs of Sunday school cards.

At the age of 14, the Delaneys would relocate back to Knoxville permanently, and it was at this point that Beauford Delaney caught the attention of Lloyd Branson, who was a prominent white Impressionist artist, who had also studied in Paris, coincidentally, and Branson really took Delaney under his wing, and he would eventually sponsor his relocation and study to Boston in 1923. And Delaney would remain there for six years, he would enroll in various programs like the Copley Society, the South Boston School of Art, the Massachusetts Normal School, and he would spend his time visiting galleries there, the MFA, the Isabella Stewart Gardner, he would admire work by the Impressionists, particularly Van Gogh, and he also loved portraits by John Singer Sargent.

In 1929, Delaney would move to New York, just a few days after the stock market crash that heralded in the Great Depression. I would say it was a rather inauspicious start for Delaney, he had his suitcase of clothes, his phonograph, and his portfolio of drawings from Boston stolen from him by the landlord whom he first attempted to rent a room from, in Harlem. He spent his first night in New York City sleeping on a park bench in Union Square, where he had his shoes stolen from him. Despite this, an auspicious start, he did eventually find his footing. He would move to Greenwich Village where he would work for a period of time, live and work in the basement of the Whitney Studio Galleries.

The Whitney Studio would be kind of his first institutional introduction to New York, he was shown there in 1930, in a group exhibition that was titled "The Sunday Painters," and for those of you who are unfamiliar with this term, it was kind of a pejorative term, meaning hobbyist painter, or someone who's unschooled, uncredentialed. Obviously for Delaney who studied for six years in Boston, that was kind of a misnomer. Our exhibition begins in 1929, when Delaney is in New York, and I'd like for you all to come over here and peek through at the earliest work that's in our exhibition, which you'll see is this 1929 charcoal portrait, titled, "Harlem Athlete."

This work was done within the first few months of Delaney's arrival in New York City, it was one of 10 charcoal portraits, and alongside five pastel portraits, that were included in his first solo exhibition, which happened at the New York Public Library, the 135th Street branch, in Harlem. In this portrait, I think particularly, you can see the academic precision that Delaney had honed as a student in Boston. But what I love is when you compare something like this, this 1929 portrait, with these portraits out here, say this 1940s "Untitled" pastel portrait, you can really get a sense of Delaney's evolving sensibility. His style is loosening up, he's becoming more expressive with his colors, and his propensity for depicting surface likeness is really beginning to fall away in favor of depicting portraits that have a deeper psychological resonance.

I think still very much in the vein of John Singer Sargent, but he's also starting to imbue his own temperament and his own interiority in these portraits. Laura and I arranged this exhibition roughly chronologically, and this center wall here acts as a demarcation, if you will indulge me, it's like a metaphorical Atlantic Ocean, that divides the New York works from the rest of the gallery, which is his Paris years. So, here on the left, we have portraits that are primarily from the 1930s and 40s, mostly of unnamed figures that he drew from Harlem, all the way down to Greenwich Village. And although Delaney spent most of his time living in downtown New York, he was still very much a part of the uptown modernist circles, very much a part of the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance.

He was friends with the Harlem Renaissance painters, Palmer Hayden and Ellis Wilson, who together with his brother, Joseph Delaney, who's pictured here in this 1933 pastel, they dubbed themselves the Saints. He was also friends with County Cullen, who was the assistant editor of Opportunity Magazine, friends with Richard Wright, he was creating murals for the Harlem Hospital, alongside the artist Charles Alston, and he was also a fixture at Charles Alston's gallery in Harlem called 306, which was kind of a meeting point for a lot of Harlem literati and creatives, including Gwendolyn Knight, and the sculptor Augusta Savage, and if you look in the vitrine room, you'll see Augusta Savage is featured in a Life Magazine article alongside Beauford Delaney.

So, I'd say even though Delaney was very much a part of the Harlem Renaissance, he was living downtown for the majority of his time in New York, and he was also very much a part of the downtown modernists. He was friendly with Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, he was also a staple at an American Place, which was Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer's, gallery. And surprisingly enough, he didn't meet Georgia O'Keefe through Alfred Stieglitz, but rather through the sculptress, Mary Callery. And an interesting anecdote I like to relay that will give you a sense of the gravitational pull, I think, of Beauford Delaney's spirit, and just the circle of friends that he had, as most of you know, Georgia O'Keefe was not a portraitist, according to the Georgia O'Keefe Museum, she only depicted two people in portraits her entire life. The first was Alfred Stieglitz's niece, Dorothy, and the second was Beauford Delaney, who she created five portraits of throughout the 1940s. You'll see a letter from her to Beauford Delaney, talking about him posing for her in the vitrines. She also contributed to his 1973 pamphlet that accompanied his retrospective at Darthea Speyer Gallery, and you'll see that also in the vitrines. The sunroom is kind of arranged chronologically according to Beauford Delaney's life.

One more portrait I want to point out to you before we move on from this wall is this standout pastel, this is of the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin. This was done in 1945, around when he was 21 years old. James Baldwin met Beauford Delaney at 181 Street when he moved there in 1936. He was around 15 or 16 years old, Delaney would've been probably around 39 years old, there was a 23-year age gap between the two. And he was brought there and introduced by a friend because James Baldwin was, at the time, struggling with his sexuality. Baldwin was coming to terms with the fact that he was a Black gay man, in a racist and homophobic society, and his friend said, I have someone that you need to meet.

James Baldwin and Delaney shared many affinities, including the fact that they were both preacher sons, for one. And so, I would say that their relationship was very much one of reciprocity. And what I mean by that is, when James Baldwin's father passed away at the age of 19, Beauford Delaney was someone who helped to arrange his father's funeral. And likewise, later in his life, when Beauford Delaney was struggling with psychiatric struggles, James Baldwin was someone who raised money for his care. He was a space of comfort, and he was also later appointed as one of the trustees by the French government to take care of Beauford Delaney's estate. The two were very close friends for nearly 40 years, and they would spend time in both New York and in Paris together.

If you want to draw your attention here to the center wall, you'll see on the wall we have mostly a collection of landscapes, and a snapshot of what is known as Beauford Delaney's 'Green Street' period. As I mentioned, Delaney lived at 181 Greene Street, from 1936 to 1952, the majority of his time in New York. And for those of you who are not familiar with The Drawing Center's history, we were founded nearly 50 years ago at 137 Greene Street. And so, of course, Beauford Delaney was at this point living in Paris, it was 1977, but I like to think that had he still been living in this neighborhood, he would've been one of the first artists that The Drawing Center exhibited, and so in some ways, for me, this show is like rectifying a long overdue oversight by bringing him back to the neighborhood, back to The Drawing Center, where he belongs.

So, while at Green Street, Delaney would of course still keep making portraits, but he would also expand his subject matter to include still lifes, urban interiors, street scenes, that are very much reminiscent to French Fauvism, and to kind of a jazzy American Cubist approach, that I would say is very comparable to the artist Stuart Davis, I'm sure some of you are already noticing that parallel. He met Stuart Davis in the 1930s, at the Art Students League. He was also a student of the Ashcan artist John Sloan, and also the Regionalist, Thomas Hart Benton. And I think you can certainly see these three artists' influence in this wall, because you've got Delaney's use of quotidian objects, he's merging this grit of Ashcan realism, and also this second generation Cubist approach to compressing and denaturalizing space. These landscapes also feature Delaney's signature lexicon of objects, you've got street lamps, hydrants, floating manhole covers here, that are again, above a compressed sidewalk. And particularly in the oil on canvas, they're very high key saturated colors that are done in these very thick impasto brushstrokes that are almost like stucco.

I also love about this wall that you can see that Delaney is again, always returning to and reworking motifs across both canvas and paper here. So, you've got another, this is a pastel from 1950, this one is from 1945, of Green Street, where he lived. And you can also see here, these landscapes, this 1950 portrait from a rendering of Central Park, you can see he's moving further toward abstraction as the years go on, because this one from 1951, he's really simplified and reduced the landscape into just colors and geometric planes at this point. One of my particular favorites on this wall is this 1946 still life of grapes. So, Delaney was a deep lover of music, particularly jazz and gospel. He was profoundly influenced by the jazz musicians that he encountered in Harlem nightclubs, like the Savoy Ballroom, Café Society, there he would listen to luminaries, like Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, and you can see three sketches of Ella Fitzgerald in the vitrine room, that Delaney created.

And I think that especially in this still life, you can really see the energy of jazz making its way into Delaney's work, he's really transformed what is a rather mundane subject into this very jazzy staccato of sharp, jagged lines, that, for me, reverberate towards the paper's edge, like a percussive sound wave. And two decades later, in a short artist statement that accompanied his Guggenheim application, Delaney would, and this is also in our vitrine sunroom, he would credit the inherent abstraction of jazz as a driving force between his own push towards non-representational painting. Rounding the corner here, sorry, I know that we're running a little out of space over here, we've got this gorgeous pastel that Delaney created of the greenhouse at the Yaddo Artists Colony, near Saratoga Springs, in New York.

Rebecca DiGiovanna:

So, Delaney spent a period of two months here in the fall of 1950, and he really credits Yaddo with pushing him towards Paris. He wrote to his friend, the author, again, Henry Miller, "I want to get rid of all my junk and go to Paris for a while, look around and grow and feel, and contemplate some of the things which have been accumulating inside myself." So, in late August 1953, three years later, he would do just that, he would board the SS Liberté, and he would sail towards Paris. He intended to stay only for a few short months, and also visit Rome, he would never again return to New York City, he would actually only come back to America once for a two-week period in 1969. And this pastel is completed within the first few months of his move to Paris. And you can see it very much retains the same qualities as his Green Street New York works.

All right, I'm going to draw your attention to this back wall, sorry. It is a walkthrough, so we're walking. So, Delaney took up residence in a modest hotel in the vibrant neighborhood of Montparnasse, and while many of his American compatriots were in Paris on the GI Bill, Delaney did not receive such funding from the US government. So, his education really consisted, or unfolded rather, outside of the confines of formal education, he again, loved to visit museums in Paris, the Louvre, l'Orangerie, and he would visit artists' studios on the Left Bank, and discuss in their salons. He was also particularly enamored and captivated by the cathedrals, particularly Notre Dame and Chartres, and he would visit both often in his early years to just bask in the exquisite light that filtered through their windows. And in 1954, he lauded Chartres the most wonderful thing ever created by man, and he would make this gorgeous oil on paper board painting, and you can see in this work, the swirling cobalt blue, and yellow, and red are encircled by these thick stacked bands that really mimic the leaded framed glass of a Chartre stained-glass window.

By the 1950s, Delaney had really shifted decisively toward abstraction at this point, the vibrant cityscapes of Green Street were really giving away to these monochrome works on paper. And you can see that they're very densely patterned, they contain this looping, almost improvisational line, and I would say that these compositions are really a convergence of three post-war currents that were happening at the time. The first of which is obviously New York Abstract Expressionism, the second is Art Informal, which really called for the embrace of spontaneity and formlessness over traditional pictorial convention, and the third was this embrace of East Asian calligraphy. And that was really in large part due to Delaney's friend, Mark Toby. So, Mark Toby has always been positioned as the precursor to Jackson Pollock, he was doing these kinds of works in 1920s, in Seattle, and they really culminated in this script based monochromatic ink drawings in the 1930s, after a trip to Japan and China.

And he would be showing these works in the Left Bank galleries when Delaney arrived in Paris. They also were very much in the vein of the artist, Lawrence Calcagno, he was a San Francisco Bay Abstract artist, who Delaney again met in the 1950s, and he was also doing these dark monochromatic ink drawings. And if you're interested in comparing the two's work, there is a book on Lawrence Calcagno and Beauford Delaney's friendship downstairs, in what we're calling our reading room. So, the vast half of this gallery here is devoted to Delaney's Clamart period works. In 1956, Delaney relocated outside of Paris to the quiet suburb of Clamart, and he did so with James Baldwin, and he worked here in a modest studio that he referred to as, "His place in the country." His studio in Clamart was bathed in this soft shifting light that filtered through a tree covered window, and it really became a sanctuary of sorts, where Delaney moved increasingly inward.

And this was a sentiment that was echoed by himself to Mary Callery, the sculptress, in 1956, where he says, "My work grows, the color deepens, and I move further inside myself as I do this." I would say this move also marked a profound shift in Delaney's practice, arriving at what many considered to be the first fully realized abstractions of Delaney's career. His Clamart gouaches really dispense with figuration entirely, and they kind of echo an Impressionist sensitivity to atmosphere, to light, to color. And their seemingly monochromatic surfaces really dissolve on closer view, and I really encourage you all to get close to these, because it's important, into these veils of luminous color. They are gestural brushworks that are layered over darker underpaintings, and several Delaney scholars have suggested that this perhaps represents Delaney's movement symbolically from darkness into light.

And this is echoed by James Baldwin in a letter you'll find in the vitrine room, from 1964, in which Baldwin writes, and I quote, "Everything one saw from this window then was filtered through these leaves. And this window was a kind of universe, moaning and wailing when it rained, black and bitter when it thundered, hesitant and delicate with the first light of the morning, and as blue as the blues when the last light of the sun departed. Well, that life, that light, that miracle are what I begin to see in Beauford's paintings. And this light began to stretch back for me over all the time we had known each other, and over much more time than that. And this light held the power to illuminate, even to redeem and reconcile and heal."

I would also say that this Clamart period is the emergence of Delaney's signature use of yellow. Delaney described yellow as the color of his sacred light, and representative of a higher power. And for me, I think yellow is really Delaney's attempt to capture joy and resist what he always referred to in his letters as an inner darkness. On the wall behind you here... So, in the 1960s, Delaney faced mounting economic hardship, he had a solo exhibition in 1960, at Paul [inaudible 00:26:08] Gallery, which was his Paris gallery, and after this, he faced mounting economic hardship, he was facing acute psychiatric struggles, and it really culminated in a mental health crisis the following year. So, in the summer of 1961, at the invitation of [inaudible 00:26:27], who was then the cultural attache of the American Cultural Center, and she was also a devout patron of Delaney's work, Delaney would board a boat bound for Greece, in search of rest and renewal.

And during this voyage, as so often happened for Delaney while he was in transit, he experienced auditory hallucinations and paranoia that were so acute that he jumped overboard into the sea in a desperate attempt to escape them. Hi. He was rescued and eventually stabilized, thankfully, the boat was still docked, but this traumatic episode resulted in a powerful body of works that Delaney called his Rorschach Tests. And it's representative by these three here.

And according to Delaney's biographer, David Leeming, these watercolors were encouraged by Delaney's doctors, they represent one of the few moments in Delaney's career where he is really directly depicting his inner turmoil. Art historian, Joyce Henry Robinson would describe them as, "Compositions where light is not absent, but merely enshrouded or overwhelmed, struggling to hold the forces of darkness at bay." And I think for me, these aqueous paintings certainly represent a certain level of anxiety and fraught state of mind for Delaney, from this traumatic episode. We will slide over here to this wall. Any questions so far? Okay. So, in this work also from 1961, Delaney is here experimenting with another European art movement, called Nuagisme, in English it's Cloudism, and this was a term that was coined by the French art critic, Julian Alvard, to describe a style of painting that explored abstraction through ethereal cloud-like forms and painting in transparent layers.

Nuagisme is really comparable to the US-based movement of Lyrical Abstraction, and it really serves as kind of a counterpoint to the geometric flatness of Cubism and the kind of machismo of American Abstraction. Punctuating these works are portraits of Henry Miller and Bernard Hassel. You know from our earlier introduction that Delaney and Miller were lifelong friends from his time in New York City. For those of you who don't know, Miller was the author of the very subversive and controversial, Tropic of Cancer, which when it was published in 1934, was immediately banned for its very explicit content regarding sex and sexuality, but it is in fact Miller's very candid descriptions of sex and sexuality that helped Delaney to cope with his own feelings as a gay Black man in post-World War II America.

And another thing I'd like to mention is that in 1945, while Delaney was still in New York, Miller was responsible for shining a national spotlight on him by the publishing of his chapbook, which is called The Amazing and Invariable Beauford Delaney. And you can find a copy of this downstairs in the sunroom, if you're interested in reading it. It's very short, chapbook is a little bit longer than a pamphlet. Bernard Hassel, pictured here, if you'd like to slide over. So, Bernard Hassel was is pictured here in two separate portraits, these are from 1968, and Hassel was a dancer who was close friends with both James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney. So, much so that when Delaney was committed to St. Anne's hospital in 1975, he was also appointed to the trusteeship to guard his affairs.

And what I think is very striking about these portraits, not only just the obvious difference between these works from '68 and his 1930s and 40s earlier portraits, where he's obviously dispensed with depicting likeness at all, but here he's instead decided to depict Bernard Hassel and his luminous silhouette against this high back orange chair, he's got his sacred color yellow, but I think in fact, that I feel, when I look at these drawings, that they are quite fraught. And Delaney completed these two in 1968, while he was on vacation with Bernard Hassel, after Hassel had found Delaney wandering the streets of Paris, following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. So, for me, I really get a sense of Delaney's fragile state of mind in these two portraits. We're going to proceed to the back room now, unless anyone has questions.

Feel free to spread out, I'm talking about all the rooms, so no one corner. So, here as you enter the drawing room, this is a mixture of Delaney's late-style abstraction and also figuration. I like this room in particular because you can really see that Delaney is moving fluidly between the two styles. According to Mary Campbell who's writing a forthcoming monograph on the artist, Delaney really didn't distinguish between figuration and abstraction, they were the same for him. And aside from a brief period that Delaney mentions in a letter in 1956 while in Clamart, where he says he's taken a two-year hiatus from portraiture, he's always exploring figuration and abstraction in tandem for the rest of his life. What I'd like to point out specifically in this room are his self-portraits, and you can really see an evolution from the portrait that greets you at the beginning, but also these here specifically.

So, here you have a 1968 monoprint on oil, and of course, it's mirror image, in which Delaney has merged his own features with that of an African figurine, maybe even a mask. To the right of it, this red oil on canvas, in which Delaney has, I think, for me, rendered himself in a more dignified fashion, really showing himself as an artist, has very much the Impressionist sensibility of Van Gogh, but it's mixing the calligraphic all over mark making from his Clamart period as well. When you look across the way here, you have two more self-portraits, and this one specifically I'd like to point out. Delaney mentioned that this was a self-portrait to David Leeming, its owner, and again, his biographer, but as you can see, and if you look closely at this label, you'll know he's again merged his features with an earlier portrait, this time of the American composer, Howard Swanson.

And then, here, across the way, you have two portraits, some of the latest dated works in our exhibition, one from 1965, and this one here from 1971, in which I think Delaney has really stripped away all pretense, to me these are incredibly raw and visceral, and you can really see and get a sense of his agitated state of mind. To the right, you have Delaney's 1971 self-portrait in a Paris bathhouse, and this is the only known self-portrait on canvas in which Delaney has presented himself fully figured, it's also his last known self-portrait. And here you can see the then 70-year-old Delaney has chosen to portray himself dressed in African garb, he's standing out against his own sacred color, the luminous yellow backdrop, and then there are hieroglyphs and motifs perhaps from the interior of the bathhouse themselves next to.

Here, focally, in this gallery, we also have a portrait of Delia Delaney, this was from 1964, and this is of his late mother, and it's really, again, less of a realistic likeness and more of a spiritual tribute to the woman who was always a guiding presence in Delaney's life. He completed this portrait six years after she passed away from memory. So, in his final years, Delaney faced mounting struggles with mental illness, and he was eventually institutionalized at St. Anne's Psychiatric Hospital in Paris, in 1975. In 1976, the French government would create a trusteeship of close friends to manage his estate, again, James Baldwin was among them. And in 1978, while Delaney was still hospitalized at St. Anne's, he would receive his first American retrospective at the Studio Museum, in Harlem.

Unfortunately, by this time, Delaney was largely unaware of this culminating moment, he really didn't recognize many people in his life, only James Baldwin and Bernard Hassel, and so it's a rather sad, culminating moment for this artist. He died on March 26th, 1979 in Paris, again, just as the world was starting to recognize his impact. Downstairs, I'd like to invite you to the reading room, if you would like to learn more about the artist. We've compiled a list of exhibition catalogs, ephemera books from various people in his life, including James Baldwin, and Henry Miller, County Cullen, that really will provide a deeper understanding of Beauford Delaney and the time in which he lived.

There's also kind of what I like to think of as a snapshot of the exhibition in entirety, there's a self-portrait down there that he created from 1950, at Yaddo, at the Artist's Colony. Also, another Nuagisme work, and a few abstracts, one of which we like to refer to as the Jackson Pollock abstract. So, if you'd like to head down there, if you'd like to read anything in the vitrine room, and I'm going to hang around for questions if anyone has them. Thank you so much for coming.

Q&A

Speaker 1:
What's it like to curate this, and collect these works considering where they've come from?

Rebecca DiGiovanna:
Yeah, actually, something that I should have mentioned perhaps is that the reason why Laura and I came to show Beauford Delaney at The Drawing Center, and we both have different reasons, but I am actually from Tennessee, from Memphis, but I studied in Knoxville. And so, I've been familiar with Beauford Delaney and also Joseph Delaney's work for the better part of a decade. And the Knoxville Museum of Art, in Delaney's case, is the largest public repository of Delaney's work, they contributed the lion's share of this exhibition. Also, the Rosenfeld Gallery in New York is the largest private collectors of Delaney's work. And then, the rest of this exhibition is a gathering of private donors from Knoxville, all the way to Paris, who contributed these works on paper.

And what I love about this exhibition in particular, there are several very stalwart Delaney scholars, but I think this is introducing a new aspect of Delaney's work that not a lot of people know. Many people come to know Beauford Delaney by way of James Baldwin, particularly because James Baldwin's centennial of his birth was last year. And I think those that do know Delaney's work happen to think of the 1960s, what are called Monogold portraits, very yellow portraits that are seen. For those of you who've been to Paris Noire, because I think some of you have mentioned, a lot of those are in that exhibition at the Pompidou in Paris.

So, I love that we are introducing, and I think expanding, I hope, expanding people's perception of Beauford Delaney through this exhibition, but I would say it changes for every exhibition. So, this one, we just happened to have two very strong, I'd say, collectors of Delaney that we could pull from, but it also, it varies.

Speaker 1:
And in your opinion, what do you think it opens, this, in comparison?

Rebecca DiGiovanna:
For Beauford Delaney? I think it really shows how heterogenous of an artist he really is. Because he's not just a portraitist who does these yellow canvases, he does so much more, and again, he's not someone that you can really pigeonhole into a particular style or motif, he's really always revisiting and reworking different things. And so, I hope that this introduces him beyond the network of his friends, beyond his friendship with James Baldwin. I think those are very important and colorful aspects of his life that really, of course, fill in the narrative. But at the end of the day, it's about his work and whether or not it can stand on the walls. Anyone else?

Speaker 2:
I am curious, because I know his brother was also an artist, was there any overlap in their time doing artwork, or were they completely separate

Rebecca DiGiovanna:
Joseph Delaney, I mentioned this briefly, but he was a prominent figurative painter as well. They did overlap in New York, they lived just a few addresses down from each other at one point, in Greenwich Village. But when you look at Joseph Delaney's work, he's very different, he's much more a figurative painter. And he would spend his entire, most of his career, in New York, he would return to Knoxville in his later years, and he would become an artist in residence at the University of Tennessee.

So, they did have a little bit of overlap, and in fact, when Delaney was committed to St. Anne's Hospital, Joseph did come over and assess the situation, to see if they wanted to bring him back to Knoxville, but again, by this point, Delaney did not recognize many people, and he determined that he was receiving quality enough care to keep him in Paris. So, they really only... Once Delaney left for Paris in 1953, he and Joe overlapped in '69, when he went to Knoxville, and then I think the family came over at some point in the 60s too.

Thank you all so much for coming, feel free to wander the exhibition.