Jun 12, 2025, 6:30 PM – 8 PM

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

Beauford Delaney, *Yaddo*, 1950. Pastel on paper, 18 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the Knoxville Museum of Art. Image credit: Knoxville Museum of Art. © Estate of Beauford Delaney, by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator

Join TDC's Assistant Curator and exhibition co-organizer Rebecca DiGiovanna for an exhibition walkthrough of In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney. The exhibition includes approximately 90 drawings, gouaches, pastels and notebook sketches marking distinct periods of American artist Beauford Delaney's career.

Born in 1901 in Knoxville, Tennessee, Beauford Delaney 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 Knoxville, 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.

Beauford Delaney

Beauford 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 Knoxville, 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.

In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney is made possible by Lonti Ebers, Agnes Gund, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, Alice and Tom Tisch, and Isabel Stainow Wilcox.

Special thanks to Michael Rosenfeld Gallery for their support and the Estate of Beauford Delaney for their cooperation in the organization of the exhibition.