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Beauford Delaney (African American; 1901 - 1979) Untitled Oil on paper c. 1962. Signed and dated lower right. Provenance: Swann Galleries, February 6, 2007. Lot 87. Private Collection. Beauford Delaney was born in 1901 in Knoxville, Tennessee to parents who were prominent and well-respected members of Knoxville's black community. While working for a sign company, he was taken as an apprentice by Lloyd Branson, an elderly American Impressionist and Knoxville's best known artist. With his encouragement, Delaney moved to Boston where he learned the essentials of the 'classical techinique' both formally, at the Massachusetts Normal School, the Copley Society, and the South Boston School of Art; and informally, by admiring the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In 1929, Delaney moved to NYC just as the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing. While he was there he took various odd jobs to support himself during the Great Depression. He painted the urban landscapes populated with the disenfranchised people who surrounded him. He also painted portraits, sometimes of his famous friends. Delaney formed close friendships with writers James Baldwin and Henry Miller, as well as artists Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keefe, and Al Hirshfeld. James Baldwin revered Delany as a master to his pupil. Later he remarked that Delaney, '…is a great painter…great art can only be created out of love, and that no greater love has ever held a brush.' In 1953, Delaney left New York for Paris. Feeling a new sense of freedom, his style shifted from the figurative compositions of NY life, to abstract expressionist studies of color and light, notably a vibrant, Van Gogh inspired yellow. He lived his remaining years here, eventually being hospitalized for mental illness and dying in 1979. In 1978, the Studio Museum of Harlem held the first major retrospective of his work. A second was held in 1988 at the Phillippe Briet Gallery. His work has also been shown in exhibitions at the Vendome Gallery, 1947; Whitney Museum of American Art, 1950; Roko Gallery, 1950; University of Maine Art Gallery, 1950; Gallery Clan, 1955; Galerie Prisme, 1956; Galerie Paul Facchetti, 1960-1; Carnegie Institute, 1962; Gallery Lambert, 1973; the High Museum of Art, 2001; Knoxville Museum of Art, 1998; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard, 2001; The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2004-5; Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2006. His work may be found in the collections of High Museum of Art, Atlanta ; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Anacostia Museum and Center for African History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Massachusetts; Wadsworth Antheneum Museum of Art, Hartford; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; Galerie Darthea Speyer, Paris. 25.5" x 19.5"