Artistic experiments: Beauford Delaney's drawings

He is known as a painter of the Harlem Renaissance, but his main focus was on drawing: Beauford Delaney (1901-1979) captured the attitude to life in New York in the 1930s and 1940s in vibrant works of art. Stylistically, he defied his classical training and painted expressively, often choosing colors spontaneously. From 1953, Delaney lived in Paris, where he also created abstract expressionist works alongside his figurative works. Delaney's work only became known to a wider audience from the end of the 1980s. The exhibition In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney is the first major exhibition ever to focus on Delaney's drawings. They served him as a place for experimentation and spontaneous artistic expression – they are autonomous works and the center of his oeuvre. Delaney rarely made studies for paintings; drawing was an independent medium for him. Around 90 of Delaney's works can be seen alongside explanatory documents and letters from the period in the exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York. The show runs from May 30 to September 14.

Beauford Delaney was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and studied art in Boston. In 1929, he moved to New York, where the Harlem Renaissance and the experiences of the Great Depression shaped his life and work. He cultivated many friendships, including with the writers Countee Cullen and Henry Miller and the painter Georgia O'Keeffe. At the beginning of the 1950s, when the international art center shifted from Paris to New York, Delaney went the opposite way and lived in Paris until his death. Quite a few Black artists and writers did the same at the time, as they felt a greater sense of freedom in Europe than in the USA. Delaney's progressive mental illness from 1961 onwards forced him to end his artistic career in the early 1970s. From 1975, he was cared for in a psychiatric ward, where he also died. His younger brother Joseph Delaney (1904-1991), who moved to New York in 1930, is also known as a painter.