Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is excited to announce the opening of In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney at The Drawing Center in SoHo. Curated by Executive Director Laura Hoptman and Assistant Curator Rebecca DiGiovanna, the exhibition features approximately ninety works on paper from each period of Delaney’s career, offering a rare survey of his stylistic evolution. As the Special Advisor and Representative of the Estate of Beauford Delaney, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is proud to support this landmark exhibition, which constitutes the first museum exhibition dedicated to Delaney’s paper oeuvre as well as his first solo exhibition in a New York museum in over thirty years. In addition to a comprehensive selection of works on paper dating from the late 1920s through the early 1970s, In the Medium of Life presents a few key paintings on canvas as well as a trove of illuminating archival materials including documentary photographs, correspondence, exhibition brochures, and press clippings. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with contributions by Hoptman, DiGiovanna, and critic Jessica Lynne.
Drawing held a vital place in Delaney’s practice, constituting an arena for exploring new painterly techniques as well as a standalone discipline in which he executed some of his most inspired compositions. Delaney’s works on paper evolved coincident with his oil paintings in both style and subject, following a trajectory that began with incisive portraits of everyday people, expanded to fauvist-inflected renditions of urban life, and later arrived at lyrical, non-objective abstractions of embodied light and color. Where he worked strictly in oil in his painting practice, Delaney embraced a variety of media in his works on paper, exploring the expressive potential of watercolor, gouache, pastel, charcoal, and more. Portraiture is an important through-line in Delaney’s oeuvre, encompassing some of his earliest mature efforts in the 1920s as well as the primary format of the representational compositions he sporadically produced following his radical shift to pure abstraction in the mid-1950s.
Each facet of Delaney’s art is well represented in The Drawing Center’s exhibition, which features masterful pastel portraits of individuals in Delaney’s circle of Greenwich Village bohemians in the 1930s and 1940s, semi-abstract renditions of architectural spaces from the 1950s, uniquely stylized portraits from his years in France, and an expansive selection of his celebrated allover abstractions. Comprising deeply spiritual explorations of light and color, Delaney’s abstractions reveal his unparalleled chromatic sensibility as well as his desire to capture the luminosity he felt and observed in the world around him. Though he continued to create representational portraits of friends and acquaintances with whom he felt a personal connection, his abstractions became the primary concern of his practice for the rest of his career, constituting the means through which he expressed the ecstatic radiance he sought to convey in purely abstract terms.
Born and raised the son of a preacher in Knoxville, Tennessee, Beauford Delaney (1901–1979) left his hometown for Boston in 1923, where he spent the next several years studying art at the Massachusetts Normal School, the Copley Society, the Lowell Institute, and the South Boston School of Art. Seeking to establish himself as an artist, Delaney moved to New York in 1929. While he enjoyed participating in the Harlem Renaissance scene that was then at its height, Delaney found himself more suited to the bohemian circles of Lower Manhattan, forming lasting friendships with numerous avant-gardists of the era including Henry Miller, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Al Hirschfeld. Living and working in a loft at 181 Greene Street, Delaney became a cultural figure within the New York art world in the 1930s and 1940s, producing a prolific body of expressive, semi-representational compositions now known as his “Greene Street” works. In 1953, at the behest of his lifelong friend James Baldwin, Delaney relocated to Paris, where he would remain for the rest of his life. A greater sense of artistic and social freedom in his adopted home propelled his art in a new direction, and he soon arrived at the gestural, non-objective compositions that forged a singular contribution to the canon of twentieth-century abstraction.
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has championed the work of Beauford Delaney for over thirty-five years and has been an integral force in the recuperation of his legacy by historians, institutions, and collectors. The gallery has organized three solo exhibitions on the artist: Beauford Delaney: Paris Abstractions (1995); Beauford Delaney: Liquid Light (1999), which was accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by scholar David Leeming, the author of important biographies of both Delaney and Baldwin; and Be Your Wonderful Self: The Portraits of Beauford Delaney (2021), the catalogue for which features a detailed chronology and new scholarship by Dr. Mary Campbell, Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Additionally, Delaney was a fixture of the gallery’s acclaimed annual exhibition series African-American Art: 20th Century Masterworks (1993–2003) and an important presence in numerous thematic group exhibitions since our inception in 1989.
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC has been the Special Advisor and Representative of the Estate of Beauford Delaney since 2018.
In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney is on view at The Drawing Center through September 14, 2025.
