Beauford Delaney - Since His Death

Since His Death

Following his death, he was praised as a great and neglected painter but, with a few notable exceptions, the neglect continued.

A retrospective of his work at the Studio Museum in Harlem, a year before his death, did little to revive interest in his work. It was not until the 1988 exhibition Beauford Delaney: From Tennessee to Paris, curated by the French art dealer Philippe Briet, at the Philippe Briet Gallery, that Delaney's work was again exhibited in New York, followed by two retrospectives in the gallery: "Beauford Delaney: A Retrospective " in 1991, and "Beauford Delaney: The New York Years " in 1994.

"Whatever Happened to Beauford Delaney?", an article by Eleanor Heartney appeared in Art in America in response to the 1994 exhibition asking why this once well regarded "artist's artist" was now virtually unknown to the American art public? "What happened? Is this another case of an over-inflated reputation returning to its true level? Or was Delaney undone by changing fashions which rendered his work unpalatable to succeeding generations? Why did Beauford Delaney so completely disappear from American art history?" The author believed that Delaney's disappearance from the consciousness of the New York art world was linked to "his move to Paris at a crucial moment in the consolidation of New York's position as the world's cultural capital and his work's irrelevance to the history of American art as it was being written by critics" at the time. The article concludes, "Today as those histories unravel and are replaced by narratives with a more varied and colorful weave, artists like Delaney can be seen in a new light."

In 1985 James Baldwin described the impact of Delaney on his life, saying he was "the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognised as my Master and I as his Pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow." He further wrote, "Perhaps I should not say, flatly, what I believe – that he is a great painter – among the very greatest; but I do know that great art can only be created out of love, and that no greater lover has ever held a brush."

Delaney's work has now been exhibited by, among others, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Harvard University Art Museums, Art Institute of Chicago, Knoxville Museum of Art, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Newark Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.