Alison Stewart: This is All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. There's a new exhibit at the Drawing Center called In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney. This is the first major New York exhibition of Beauford Delaney's work in over 30 years. James Baldwin said that, for him, Delaney was, "The first living, walking proof that a Black man could be an artist."

Delaney was known for his paintings, but the show traces his life through art, ephemera and drawings. This includes a childhood in Tennessee born to a formerly enslaved mother, his immersion in the Harlem Renaissance, his life in the village, and his practice later in life when he followed other African Americans to Paris in the '50s. It follows his friendships with Georgia O' Keeffe and James Baldwin.

In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney is on view now at the Drawing Center at 35 Worcester Street through September 14th. You can see a sample of Delaney's work in the on our Instagram story now, @allofitwnyc. I have with me now in studio Laura Hoptman, executive director of the Drawing Center. Nice to meet you.

Laura Hoptman: Thank you for having us, Allison.

Alison Stewart: Assistant curator Rebecca, I'm going to try to get your last name, DiGiovanna.

Rebecca DiGiovanna: You got it.

Alison Stewart: Ah, welcome.

Rebecca DiGiovanna: Thank you so much for having us.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about the history of the Drawing Center in case listeners have really never been. When was the Drawing Center founded and why?

Laura Hoptman: The Drawing Center is an almost 50-year-old institution founded in 1977 in SoHo, dedicated to contemporary art and ideas seen through the lens of drawing.

Alison Stewart: How does your organization consider the value of drawing within art, history, and within curation?

Laura Hoptman: One of the things that the Drawing Center celebrates is that the ubiquity of drawing, everybody draws. I called it a lens, but it's also a portal through which we can really relate to and talk about all kinds of issues and important things that are happening in the world, culturally and otherwise. It's a way that we can touch regular people as well as artists.

Alison Stewart: Rebecca, why do you think Beauford Delaney's drawings are worth a closer look?

Rebecca DiGiovanna: Well, so what I always like to tell people is that Delaney was a draftsman for his entire life. He started drawing as a child sitting in the pews of his father's church. He and his brother, Joseph Delaney, would doodle on the backs of Sunday school cards. His first solo exhibition in New York was a show composed entirely of drawings. It was held at the New York Public Library Branch, the 135th Street Branch in Harlem.

Even later in his life, when Delaney was committed to St. Anne's Psychiatric Hospital in 1975 and he was no longer really cognizant of his surroundings and wasn't recognizing people, the staff at St. Anne's would provide Delaney with drawing materials and paper because, for him, it was always a form of self-expression and solace.

Alison Stewart: When you think about Beauford Delaney's drawing, Laura, I'm trying to figure out, how can it help us understand his craft as an artist?

Laura Hoptman: One of the things that's really special about the exhibition, but also about Beaufort Delaney's career, is that it can be traced through drawing from the beginning to the last works that he did. The other thing that makes it easier for us to discuss Delaney as a whole, as an artist as a whole, via drawing, is the fact that we have a very expansive definition of what a drawing is. It can be a work on paper or charcoal. It could be a painting on a support that is maybe cardboard or paper. It could be a pastel. There are many things, a gouache, a watercolor. Am I missing anything? It can be many different things.

Rebecca DiGiovanna: So many things.

Laura Hoptman: For us, drawing is really not an excuse, but rather a support for the ideas of the artist that we are presenting. Delaney's wonderful strange and non-linear career is one that can be seen through these experiments of works on paper. From his earliest work, the earliest one we have in the show is 1929, until the beginning of the 1970s when he became too ill to work any further.

Alison Stewart: Yes, you can see it in the show. I was there yesterday, and I walked in, and every room, every piece I went to, this is different, this is different, this is different.

Rebecca DiGiovanna: Exactly. Someone in the Financial Times, a reviewer, put it rather succinctly, I think, when she said that it feels like a one-man group exhibition. It does feel like there could be seven or eight different artists in the show. I think it's because Delaney was always experimenting. I mean, he started with academic realism. He moved into kind of Fauvist inflected pieces, very cubist pieces. He experimented with expressionism, calligraphic abstraction, and back again. There really are so many differences.

I think people really are familiar with a very specific subset of Delaney's works, really his 1960s portraits on these luminous yellow canvases of famous figures like Marian Anderson, Ella Fitzgerald. I think what Laura and I hope is that people who visit the Drawing Center really get a sense of just how expansive his practice was on paper.

Alison Stewart: I'm speaking with Laura Hoptman, executive director of the Drawing Center, and Rebecca DiGiovanna, assistant curator. We're discussing the exhibition, In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney. It's on view through September 14th. Let's do a little bit of bio. Beauford Delaney was born in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1901, the son of a preacher and a mother who was formerly enslaved. Rebecca, what do we know about his early life, how he became interested in art, whether he was doodling on the hymnals?

Rebecca DiGiovanna: Like I said, he really found early self-expression in the pews of his father's church. His ministry circuit took the family all around the Southern Appalachians. When Delaney and his family returned to Knoxville, Delaney was 14, and his family settled there permanently. It was at that that he caught the attention of a prominent white artist named Lloyd Branson. Lloyd really took him under his wing. He would eventually sponsor Delaney's relocation and study in Boston. Delaney would spend about six years studying at various institutions like the Copley Society, the Boston Normal School, really getting a formal education, grounding in drawing and art.

Alison Stewart: All right, this is a little bit of a tangent, but you're from Tennessee.

Rebecca DiGiovanna: I am.

Alison Stewart: What did you observe about Delaney's reputation in his hometown?

Rebecca DiGiovanna: Knoxville is really doing so much in terms of recognition for Beauford Delaney, and I think it's really started to catch on nationally, but the Knoxville Museum of Art is the largest repository of Beauford Delaney's work. The University of Tennessee also is the collection of the Delaney papers. They are also, I think, in the process of starting a Delaney Museum, which will be not in Delaney's original childhood home, but the family home, because Delaney's original home was lost to urban renewal.

They really are, and the work is really credited, I think, in large part to several Knoxville-based scholars. Stephen wicks at the KMA has been working with Delaney's work for 20 years, and he's done so much in terms of getting people to, I think, really take recognition of Delaney outside of the circle of James Baldwin.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask Laura, what did it take to put this show together?

Laura Hoptman: This is something that's been in our sort of dreams for several years now. One of the lucky things was that there are repositories, as Rebecca just said, of Delaney work in several locations, one of them being the Knoxville Museum of Art. This very, very generous sister institution was crucial for us to be able to put this exhibition together. The bulk of Delaney's estate is also preserved at a commercial gallery, the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, and between the two, the KMA and the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, we really had a great beginning for an exhibition.

Alison Stewart: You said that this was sort of on your bucket list of shows. Why was it?

Laura Hoptman: Delaney is an extraordinary American artist for many different reasons, but the thing that interested us the most, outside of the fact that we could tell his story on paper, was that his career flies in the face of conventional art history. The way that it starts academically, then it transitions towards a kind of modern art, modernism. It goes from academic art to modern art, but then makes this huge leap towards complete abstraction.

That said, at the same time, he hasn't forgotten Delaney, hasn't forgotten his love of portraiture and figurative art, and he begins to paint figuratively again. The career stands in opposition to the conventional idea that there is some sort of artistic progress from being able to draw a figure to being able to draw abstractly. Actually, it's happening with Delaney in tandem. This is coupled with the fact that he had a bifurcated career in the United States and in Europe as well.

After the Second World War, the conventional story of modern and contemporary art in the United States and in Europe is that after World War II, the United States rose to prominence. The language of abstract expressionism, as an example, was one that dominated the avant-garde. If you look at Delaney, who was working expressionistically but also realistically at the same time, during the period of time when we saw artists like Jackson Pollock, Ellsworth Kelly and others here in the United States really does not just destroy the teleology, the ladder that we've created to talk about progress in culture, but it also enriches it enormously.

Alison Stewart: Rebecca, I want to roll back to 1929, because that's when he comes to New York.

Rebecca DiGiovanna: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Sort of the midst of the Harlem Renaissance. What was his relationship to the Harlem Renaissance?

Rebecca DiGiovanna: Delaney spent much of his time living in New York downtown. His early years were spent in Greenwich Village. He worked and lived in a ground floor apartment for the Whitney Studio Galleries, which was the predecessor to the Whitney Museum Gallery, before moving to Greene Street. What I will say is that he really always toed the line between the downtown modernists, that of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. He was a staple at An American Place with Alfred Stieg, but he was very much also a part of the Harlem Renaissance that was in full swing.

He had friendships, close friendships with the Harlem Renaissance painters Ellis Wilson and Palmer Hayden, who together with Delaney's brother Joseph, they referred to themselves as the Saints. He was also close with Countee Cullen, who was the assistant editor of the Opportunity magazine. He painted murals alongside Charles Alston for the Works Progress Administration. He was very much a part of this scene, and he loved going to nightclubs in Harlem, listening to jazz and all of the luminaries that you'd hear like Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie.

Alison Stewart: Oh, there's a Spotify playlist, I should say.

Rebecca DiGiovanna: There is. The Drawing Center's first Spotify playlist, which is composed of songs that are mostly pulled from Delaney's biographer, David Leeming's biography of Beauford Delaney. It's a mixture of classical music, gospel songs, blues, all kinds of things. It's a great listen.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the exhibition at the Drawing Center, In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney. We'll have more after a break. This is All of It.

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You're listening to All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. I'm speaking with Laura Hoptman, executive director of the Drawing Center, and Rebecca DiGiovanna, assistant curator. We're discussing the exhibition, In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney. It's on view through September 14th. James Baldwin was a friend of Beauford's. They were lifelong friends. Laura, what did they see in each other?

Laura Hoptman: They had a lot in common, despite the age difference. Both of them were sons of preachers. Both of them were men born in the South. Both of them were gay and probably many other elements. Both of them were geniuses. How can I forget that? I think that they recognized in one another that spark, that extraordinary spark of creativity.

Delaney was enormously popular during his New York period, and people came and made pilgrimage to see him. At age 15, James Baldwin, this young aspiring writer, did that as well. When he did meet him, he realized not only somebody who had-- there was not only a meeting of the minds, but rather a meeting of inspiration, because when you think about a 15-year-old James Baldwin and his brilliance and his beauty, you could see him as a muse for Delaney. Delaney did many portraits over the years of Baldwin, but as Baldwin says, Delaney was his muse as well. They were mutual muses to one another and their creativity.

Alison Stewart: I'm picturing a 15-year-old James Baldwin right there.

Rebecca DiGiovanna: There's a striking portrait in our exhibition that's on loan from the James Baldwin Library in McDowell. It depicts, it's a pastel 21-year-old James Baldwin. It feels really quite tender and touching. I think, in many ways, again, like Laura said, they shared a background, but Baldwin notes in his Notes of a Native Son, his relationship with his own father was quite complex and also quite repressive. I think, in a lot of ways, he saw in Delaney, especially in those early years, he was kind of a father figure for Delaney.

Laura Hoptman: Yet Baldwin was-- did you just say that Baldwin was a father figure for Delaney?

Rebecca DiGiovanna: Oh, I'm sorry. Beauford Delaney was a father figure for Baldwin, but it kind of flip flopped.

Laura Hoptman: That's right.

Rebecca DiGiovanna: That's what you were going to say.

Laura Hoptman: Exactly. They kind of flip flopped. Baldwin swooped in to save Delaney numerous times when he needed it, when he was ill. In the end, he was instrumental in getting him the care that he needed at the end of his life.

Alison Stewart: Rebecca, Beauford Delaney was gay and he struggled with his sexuality. How did those struggles weigh on him through his life?

Rebecca DiGiovanna: I mean, Delaney was raised in a religious household, and I think his early recognition of his queerness, coupled with the fact that he grew up in the Jim Crow South was really quite difficult for him. According to his biographer, David Leeming, he would become a little bit more open upon his arrival in New York and, obviously, again, in Europe, but he was always incredibly private and somewhat puritanical about his sexuality.

I think there are those in his New York circle that would help him come to terms with it a little bit more.

For instance, the American author, Henry Miller, who wrote the incredibly subversive Tropic of Cancer, and it was quickly banned in the US because it was depicts very explicit perspectives on sex, but Delaney credits Henry Miller with helping him to come to terms with his sexuality a little bit. There's a lot of speculation over romantic relationships that he might have had in his life. The great loves of his life are often listed as James Baldwin, which was always platonic, as far as we know. Also, the Italian singer Dante Pavone, who he met in New York, and the San Francisco Bay artist Lawrence Calcagno, who he met in Paris. Also, according to Leeming, he really never had lasting romantic relationships.

Alison Stewart: Like you said, there are some amazing, amazing drawings in this of Henry Miller, of James Baldwin, of his mother. Laura, what do you think Delaney saw in people that made him want to paint or draw them in a certain way?

Laura Hoptman: At the risk of sounding religious, the light, the soul. Even in his most radically simplified depictions, like the one of his mother that we have in the exhibition, you can see the glow of the soul. You literally can see the glow of the soul. The eyes might be simple, but they're always alive. The backgrounds, although many of them are monochromatic, are roiling. Of course, it's with the brushstroke or the pencil stroke where the artist gets to emote. There's a convergence of those emotions. It's particularly interesting when he attempts to take abstraction and figuration and put it together in portrait depictions, for example, of Ahmed Bioud. Is that the name of the--

Rebecca DiGiovanna: The professor.

Laura Hoptman: A professor, right. Which is a wonderful abstraction, a yellow abstraction, which is a kind of quintessential Delaney-esque trope, but out of that abstraction emerges just the outline of Bioud, of the professor. For one reason or another, it's enough, and we know who he is and how important he was to Delaney.

Alison Stewart: There are many self portraits of Delaney in the show, Rebecca. What can we learn about his practice, about him from these various self portraits?

Rebecca DiGiovanna: There are somewhere in the realm of 24 portraits in our exhibition. Everything from ink and pastel and gouache to canvas and paper, even one that's on an envelope in our vitrines. I think you can really get a sense of how, again, heterogeneous and expansive Delaney's practices through his portraits. The earliest one we have is a 1950 portrait that presides over our lower level galleries in what we were calling our Delaney Reading Room from Yaddo.

What I think is really quite notable in our exhibition is the back room, where we have an entire back wall of self portraits, and you really get a sense of Delaney's evolution. There's a 1968 pairing where Delaney has merged his own facial features with that of an African mask. Another one in which he really has an oppressionist sensitivity, and you can calligraphic mark making that he started developing in 1950.

Then aside from that are two really stark ink on paper portraits where Delaney has really stripped away all pretense. To me, they feel almost like caricatures of Delaney. These are done in the late 1960s, early '70s. Again, as Laura and I mentioned, he was really struggling with his mental illness at this point. For me, they feel quite visceral and vulnerable. The final portrait in our show is the last known self portrait by Delaney, where he's pictured himself fully figured in a Parisian bathhouse against his luminescent yellow background.

Alison Stewart: Why did Delaney decide to relocate to Paris?

Laura Hoptman: Oh, there's so many reasons, because even after the Second World War, Paris was still considered the center of the visual culture community in Europe and America. It still was the home of Picasso and Matisse and many, many other artists who might have spent the war in New York, but returned post-haste to Europe afterwards, and mostly to Paris. It was also a place where, as an African American artist, Delaney felt like he could breathe. He knew this because of the friends and associates who were already in Paris and telling him so. When James Baldwin in 1953 suggested that Delaney come to visit Baldwin in Paris, he jumped at the chance, got on a boat, and never returned to the United States.

Rebecca DiGiovanna: Well, to New York, but he did come to Knoxville, just for a couple of weeks.

Laura Hoptman: Sorry, never returned to the United States.

Rebecca DiGiovanna: He had never intended to stay there. It was only for a couple of months that he intended to visit Paris.

Alison Stewart: His style changed that point, yes?

Laura Hoptman: It took less than two months. This figurative artist, this landscape or cityscape painter and portrait painter, became an expressionist, abstractionist, and a monochrome painter in a very, very short period of time.

Alison Stewart: You've mentioned a couple of times, his loving the color or his sort of embracing of the color yellow. Will you explain to us why?

Rebecca DiGiovanna: Sure. In 1955, Delaney moved to a suburb outside of Paris with James Baldwin. He was really seeking some respite from the hustle and bustle of Montparnasse. There, I would say, is really where his signature use of yellow emerges. Delaney referred to yellow as the color of his sacred light, and he thought of it as representative of a higher power. I think, for me, in particular, that the use of yellow is Delaney's attempt to capture joy and resist what he always referred to in his letters as his inner darkness.

Alison Stewart: That's an interesting description, as inner darkness. You've talked a lot about him having mental health issues. Laura, would you explain a little more?

Laura Hoptman: Delaney suffered from mental health issues throughout his entire life. In his adulthood and later adulthood, it was exacerbated by other issues, poverty as well as alcohol. It was an intermittent kind of suffering. Sometimes he heard voices and sometimes he didn't. There were periods of crises. At one notable time, at the beginning of the 1960s, again, when he traveled in around 1964, was it, Rebecca?

Rebecca DiGiovanna: Yes, I think 1961, as so often happened, I think with artists and with Delaney in particular, when he's in unfamiliar settings, he experienced an acute episode, and it resulted in a really powerful body of works that are on view in our main gallery called Rorschach Tests. These really are the most direct depiction Delaney will have of showing his inner turmoil that resulted from these auditory hallucinations that he had throughout his life.

Laura Hoptman: In the end, this is what brought him to incarceration in a hospital and finally his death at age 77 in 1979. The illness also became so acute that it prevented him from working. He stopped around 1975.

Rebecca DiGiovanna: I think it's really hard. I'm hard pressed to find anything past 1973, but yes.

Alison Stewart: This is the first major exhibition of his work in New York in many decades. Why do you think he's not been appreciated until now?

Rebecca DiGiovanna: Again, I really do think that people have come to associate him by way of James Baldwin. James Baldwin's centennial of his birth was last year, 2024. It was accompanied by a lot of fanfare, a lot of exhibitions, which included a lot of Delaney's portraits of James Baldwin. I think people have only now started to come to Beauford Delaney outside of James Baldwin as a result of that, but I think that Delaney is having a moment, and I hope it will continue for many years to come.

Laura Hoptman: I think, though, in a larger sense, it's because Delaney's career doesn't fit neatly into the art history, the story that we tell ourselves of post-war art history in America and in Europe. That is the story of modernism writ large, the story of avant-gardeism, the story of the development of African American art since the Harlem Renaissance. All those wonderful stories, and Delaney ruins all of them.

Alison Stewart: The name of the show is In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney. It's at the Drawing Center on Worcester Street, 35 Worcester Street through September 14th. Thanks so much to Laura Hoptman and to Rebecca DiGiovanna. Thank you for being with us.

Rebecca DiGiovanna: Thank you so much, Alison.

Laura Hoptman: Thank you so much, Alison.