Beauford Delaney
This is a photograph of Beauford Delaney. On the back of this photograph, Beauford has written to Don and Lydia: “One winter day. Love, Beauford.” For Don’s illustrated biographical sketch of Beauford and his description of one winter’s day in the life of Beauford Delaney, click here or on the photograph!
For more information on Beauford, see the biography Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney, by David Leeming (Oxford University Press 1998. ISBN 0-19-509784-X) In his review, Mark P. Fisher writes “Born in 1901, Delaney spent his childhood and teen years in Knoxville, Tennessee. He then moved to Boston, then to Harlem and other New York City locations, and finally to France, mostly Paris. … Along the way, Delaney befriends a young author, James Baldwin, and a lifelong friendship ensues…”
My ex-wife and I visited Beauford in his Paris apartment/studio in 1969. What a gentle and wonderful person!
At the very end of an interview with Betty Hoag for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, there are very interesting comments by Don on Beauford and the problem of being an African-American artist in the US at that time. These remarks by Don are one of the rare places that I ever heard my father speak on his feelings on this subject, which must have been a very emotional issue for him (note, for instance, that Lisa and her mother in Don’s best-known children’s book “Corduroy” are African-American - at that time a revolution in mass-market children’s books in the US).
