Latest news with #BeaufordDelaney
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Two original Beauford Delaney artworks to be auctioned during Beck-Met Gala
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WATE) — On Monday, two pieces of artwork created by historic Knoxville artist Beauford Delaney will be up for auction to benefit the Beck Cultural Exchange Center The Beck-Met Gala is being held on Monday, March 5 in honor of the Beck Cultural Exchange Center's 50th anniversary. The ticketed event will be at 5:30 p.m. at the Grande on Clinton Highway. During the event, there will be a live auction featuring two original Beauford Delaney artworks, custom-framed for the gala. Dog rescued during animal cruelty case in Cumberland County in need of a new home Beauford Delaney is one of the few African-American painters associated with abstract expressionism, a style featured in one of the artworks that will be up for auction, according to the Associated Press. In 2023, one of Delaney's original artworks, Pastel Portrait of a Man, sold for $48,000 at auction. Both pieces that will be auctioned at the gala are undated and unsigned. The first piece is an untitled portrait, crafted with pastel on paper. The artwork depicts a man in a suit against a saturated red and blue background. While the piece is roughly 25 inches by 19 inches, the Beck Cultural Exchange Center noted that the artwork has some fraying along the upper edge and left corners. The piece features a similar abstract expressionism style as Delaney's Pastel Portrait of a Man. The second piece of artwork is an Afrique lithograph, which features an abstract design of vibrant pink, blue and green colors. The piece also measures approximately 25 inches by 19 inches. Although the artwork is undated, the Studio Museum in Harlem lists a piece by Delaney that is similar in size, style and color dated to 1963 on its website. While guests are encouraged to attend the live auction, there is also an option for guests to complete absentee bids online. The absentee bids will close at 3 p.m. on the day of the auction. Tickets to the Beck-Met Gala, priced at $100, can be purchased at the Beck Cultural Exchange Center's website, which is also where absentee bids can be placed. 'Shooting Hunger' uses sporting clays to raise money for Tennessee food banks 'This auction is a key component of the evening, highlighting the significance of art and culture within our community. This is a unique opportunity to acquire a distinctive piece of history while contributing to the ongoing support of Beck,' the Beck Cultural Exchange Center wrote. In addition to having an extensive art collection that includes the works of Beauford Delaney, Beck Cultural Exchange Center is working to restore the ancestral home of Beauford and Joseph Delaney that will one day become the Delaney Museum at Beck. The brothers, who were born in the early 1900's, are considered among the greatest artists of the 20th century. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Guardian
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Basquiat to Delaney: inside the exhibition honouring 50 years of art in Black Paris
Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. I was in France at the weekend to check out the Paris Noir exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, an odyssey through the generations of Black artists from across the world who found a complicated sanctuary in the city. This was supplemented with a walking tour on the life of the artist Beauford Delaney, guided by the company Entrée to Black Paris, and finished off with a mind-blowingly delicious Senegalese dinner. Yes, I'm trying to make you jealous. That's all after the roundup. You're invited into Paris Noir by the frank, sobering gaze of its lead exhibition image: a self-portrait by the South African artist Gerard Sekoto completed in 1947. A modernist, expressionist work with bold, contrasting colours seeming to convey unease, reflection and solemnity, Sekoto painted it days before travelling to London as a self-imposed political exile from South Africa. That year, he would arrive in Paris where he faced difficult living conditions, finding employment as a jazz pianist and singer of South African melodies and Negro spirituals at the nightclub l'Échelle de Jacob (Jacob's ladder). Of the 150 Black artists across 350 works exhibited, many of them have stories like Sekoto's – coming from the US, Caribbean, South America and Africa to find an artistic refuge in Paris. The scope of the exhibition is expansive, an excavation of artistic movements from Afro-Atlantic surrealism to Parisian syncretism. There's paraphernalia from Présence Africaine, the pan-African culture magazine founded by the Senegalese writer and editor Alioune Diop in the 1940s (to which Sekoto contributed), theological meditations in the Ivorian sculptor Christian Lattier's 1957 work Le Christ, and subversions of US racial stereotypes in advertising and comics abstracted into a collage by the French-Haitian artist Hervé Télémaque. What emerges from this vast collection is a beautiful sense of the Black Atlantic. Of artists and writers and thinkers pouring in from across the globe, finding a haven in which aesthetic expressions, debates and dialogues were forged in a world contending with decolonisation through pro-independence movements in Africa and the Caribbean as well as western civil rights struggles. They often documented these times: Bob Thompson depicted US lynchings and the violent quashing of civil rights protests; Sekoto covered the tragic revolutionaries in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia). But political art was not only of the world outside France. In May 1967, in response to a racist attack, riots broke out in Guadeloupe, a Caribbean island that morphed from a colony to an overseas department. Protesters were violently suppressed by French police, who opened fire on striking workers in the economic capital, Pointe-à-Pitre. In 1975, the French Guianese artist José Legrand painted a photorealistic diptych of a scene from the demonstrations. In this Parisian Black Atlantic, the refining of method and a collaborative, artistic corpus flourish. Networks and friendships are formed. Black artists enter one another's orbits and are moved to create even greater works. In the 1990s, the Senegalese artist As M'Bengue created a visual language in his paintings, with its graffiti, graphic art and anti-capitalist social criticism, inspired by the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom he had met in Paris in 1988. Equally, the abstract, impressionist works of Ed Clark, which includes an untitled painting of three bold strokes created by a 'big sweep' technique, are inspired by the works of his friend Beauford Delaney. If Sekoto is the face of the Paris Noir exhibition, then Delaney is its beating heart. The first piece in your line of sight when you enter the show is his 1968 painting Street Scene (Paris), a sunny, hazy vision of the city through thick, swirling yellow brushstrokes applied using his signature impasto technique, reminiscent of the style of Vincent van Gogh. Tennessee-born Delaney features in all corners of the exhibition, his work relevant to discussions of abstraction, representation, political resistance and portraiture. Delaney's life was fascinating but tragic, as I learn from Monique Y Wells of Entrée to Black Paris, which provides guided walking tours of Black Parisian history, culture and contemporary life (and which I cannot recommend enough). Wells takes me on a stroll through Montparnasse, a neighbourhood steeped in history. As Wells tells me, Henry Ossawa Tanner, often described as the first famous African American painter, came to live in Paris in the late 19th century, which became a draw for other African American artists to arrive. After the second world war, US legislation provided a package of benefits including education funding, low-interest loans and low-cost mortgages for returning veterans to readjust to civilian life and access opportunities. As such, Montparnasse received a wave of African Americans travelling to Paris to attend art schools. Though Delaney was not a veteran, it was this pre-established enclave that he was welcomed into when he moved to Paris on the invitation of his friend James Baldwin in 1953. Wells tells me that Montparnasse was 'in effect a slum' with ramshackle properties – meaning that poor artists such as Delaney could afford to live and create there. There were a number of bouillons, inexpensive restaurants, that Delaney would frequent, such as the Les Mille Colonnes. Wells also takes me to the site of La Bohème, a former club exclusively for white GIs who had imposed their racist attitudes on to post-second world war French proprietors. It was eventually taken over by Buttercup Powell, the girlfriend of the musician Bud Powell, who transformed the premises into Buttercup's Chicken Shack - a space where musicians and artists could eat cheaply, and where the Trinidadian jazz pianist Hazel Scott played. In the Paris Noir exhibition, the affectionate relationship between Delaney and Baldwin is honoured. As Black gay men, with Delaney struggling with acceptance of his sexuality, their friendship was especially important in light of the hardships and social pressures they faced. Next to a Delaney painting of Baldwin is a quote by the Giovanni's Room author: 'I learned about light from Beauford Delaney: the light contained in everything, in every surface, in every face.' Delaney created more than a dozen works featuring or inspired by Baldwin, presenting him in different modes – from the majestic intellectual thinker to the compassionate source of warmth and intimacy he had come to know so well. Sign up to The Long Wave Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world after newsletter promotion That intimacy is key to Delaney's work, as is the prominence of colour and light – particularly yellow, a pigment for hope that, with the raised textures of impasto, captured a yearning for freedom and happiness in contrast to his real life circumstances. His textures seem to capture sound through image: he uses yellow impasto brushes to paint the contralto and civil rights figure Marian Anderson, reminiscent of Byzantine iconography. As the exhibition text reads, the portrait 'vibrates like a strange music'. The tragic details of the artist's life that I learned on the walking tour added a poignancy to his works. As Wells tells me, Delaney lived in poverty and struggled with mental illness for much of his life. He spent the final years before his death in 1975 in hospital 'for the insane' . Much like Delaney is threaded throughout the exhibition, he is also felt everywhere in this corner of Paris. There are numerous plaques for residences and restaurants he frequented, and so many cafés he would sit outside for hours, people watching and doodling - La Bohème, La Select, La Coupole. At the end of the weekend I'm left with a sense that Paris, as a crossroads for the meeting of Black artists and cultures, has a strong claim for being one of the great Black diasporic cities – something Monique Wells tells me is under-discovered, and continues to surprise people. I finished my time in the French capital with a visit to Waly-Fay restaurant, which serves traditional Senegalese cuisine, and ate one of the best meals of my life – fish pèpè soup, suya skewers breaded in cassava flour and chicken yassa, washed down with a hibiscus drink. I wondered about the Black artists of today who come through here, making plans for radical work and sharing ideas over incredible food. Paris Noir is at the Pompidou Centre until 30 June. To receive the complete version of The Long Wave in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here.
