GLR July-August 2025

Let There Be Art

W HEN JAMES BALDWIN met painter Beauford De laney in 1940, he was six teen, Delaney 39. Advised by one of his friends to visit the artist in his Greenwich Village apartment, Baldwin later recalled that when the door opened, he encountered “a short round brown man” with “the most extraordinary eyes I’d ever seen.” Delaney was for Baldwin “the first

artist who assisted in sending him to Boston to study. There, he took classes informally and modeled, unable to enroll in the segre gated art schools. Through a range of con nections, Delaney was introduced both to wealthy, socially progressive white people and to Black civil rights figures. Moving to New York City just as the Great Depression was beginning in 1929, Delaney soon be came one of the few Black “Greenwich Vil

R EGINALD H ARRIS

SPECULATIVE LIGHT The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin Edited by Amy J. Elias Duke Univ. Press. 332 pages, $35.

lage Bohemians.” He befriended many prominent figures of the time, including Georgia O’Keeffe and her lover Alfred Stieglitz, writer Henry Miller, and the poet Countee Cullen, who later taught French to a high schooler named James Baldwin. In 1953, Delaney left for Paris, where his painting shifted from portraits and figurative compositions to abstract studies of color and light. Although his work was shown at numerous group and one-man shows in Europe, Delaney always lived in extreme poverty, giving away what little money he had to friends and those less fortunate. He drank heavily and suf fered from periods of mental instability and paranoia for most of his life, hearing threatening and berating voices. Numerous close friends tried to care for him, including Baldwin, who had the artist live with him for a time at his home in St. Paul de Vence. As his condition deteriorated, in 1971 Delany was first hospitalized, then committed to St. Anne’s Hospital for the Insane outside Paris. He died there in 1979. Elias commissioned essays from nineteen artists, crit ics, writers, and scholars for Speculative Light , including Baldwin biographers Nicholas Boggs, Robert Reid-Pharr, Magdalena Zaborowska, and Leeming. Essays explore the ways in which both men’s art and lives were shaped by their friendship, through topics that from masculinity, queerness, blackness, and Americanness to the relation ship between jazz, painting, and writing. Hilton Als imag ines Delaney’s thoughts before first meeting the teenage Baldwin. Poet Ed Pavli ć calls upon archival letters from Bald win to his brother David that illuminate the conflict of being both a public figure and a private person. Much of the focus in the first sections of Speculative Light is on how the artist influenced the writer’s work. Elias views both men employing “synesthetic aesthetics” in their work: “multisensory experiments whereby one art form provokes in sights into, or even is redefined as, another art form—to help au diences ‘hear’ a painting or ‘see’ music, for example.” For Columbia professor Robert G. O’Meally, Baldwin’s writing in “Sonny’s Blues,” a short story, “visualizes on the page: pictur ing characters and scenes in words with deliberate use of color, texture, and layers; enlisting strategies most closely associated with painting.” This story appears in a collection dedicated to Delaney, 1965’s Going to Meet the Man . Baldwin often spoke of how Delaney taught him “nothing less than how to see.” In a 1984 interview, he recalled “walking

living, walking proof ... that a Black man could be an artist.” Over the next 38 years, Delaney became Baldwin’s “spiri tual father”: “I learned about light from Beauford Delaney, the light contained in everything, in every surface, in every face.” The artist painted the first of his many portraits of Baldwin in 1942, a nude he titled Dark Rapture . David Leeming, a biogra pher of both men, believes that Delaney was in love with Bald win from the beginning, though there’s no record of their being physical. Three of Delaney’s later portraits graced the covers of

Penguin Random House’s 2024 Baldwin Centennial reissues of Go Tell It on the Mountain , Giovanni’s Room , and If Beale Street Could Talk . Amy J. Elias, a professor and director of the Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is the editor of Speculative Light: The Arts of Beau ford Delaney and James Baldwin . She considers Delaney to be “an artistic genius, and [a] model of perseverance as a south ern, gay, Black man.” Professor Monika Gehlawat comments that the pair “formed a kind of kinship in exile, a family of their own” that helped them to navigate their shared identity as queer Black American artists. Delaney was born into a prominent African-American fam ily in Knoxville in 1901. Both he and his younger brother be came painters, showing an interest in art from a young age. Delaney’s first works were noticed by an older white Knoxville James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney, Paris, circa 1960. Estate of Beauford Delaney.

Reginald Harris is a writer and poet based in Brooklyn. 36

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