Beauford Delaney - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session New York Wednesday, November 16, 2022 | Phillips
  • "There always seems to be the shadow which follows the light."
    –Beauford Delaney, writing to James Baldwin
    Painted four years after Beauford Delaney’s career-defining move to Paris from New York, Yellow Abstraction is an intimate example of the artist’s luminous abstractions for which he became known. As indicated by the inscription on the reverse, this work was painted in Clamart, a suburb of Paris where Delaney lived from 1956 to 1962. His close friend and mentee James Baldwin said, “There was a window in Beauford's house in Clamart before which we often sat—late at night, early in the morning, at noon. This window looked out on a garden; or rather, it would have looked out on a garden if it had not been for the leaves and branches of a large tree which pressed directly against the window. Everything one saw from this window, then, was filtered through these leaves.”i
     
    In contrast to his portraits of fellow artists and creatives made in New York City, Delaney’s abstract paintings of the late 1950s and 1960s boast a layered vibrancy. Beneath the bright yellow impasto, a signature color in the artist’s work, peek through subtle passages of green and pink—like the foliage interspersed with bright rays of sunshine outside of the window in Clamart. The canvas is textured from the artist’s varied application methods, for which he used palette knives, his own fingers, and sometimes even squeezed paint directly from the tube. The palette bears resemblance to some of Delaney’s most prized masterworks in collections as esteemed as The Museum of Modern Art, New York—where Composition 16, 1954-1956 currently hangs on the fourth floor—and the Cleveland Museum of Art, who recently acquired a yellow abstract painting from 1958 this past September. 

     

    Beauford Delaney, Composition 16, 1954-1956, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Image: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY, Artwork: © Estate of Beauford Delaney by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY

    Despite being highly regarded by some of the most important 20th century artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Willem de Kooning, Delaney suffered through financial hardship throughout his entire career. It wasn’t until a year before his death in 1978 that the Studio Museum in Harlem mounted the first retrospective of the artist’s work. Today, Delaney’s work is finally receiving the recognition it deserves with its inclusion in major exhibitions around the world, and its acquisition by various notable institutions. 

     

     

    Translation: 

    Interviewer: You come from the United States but yet your name is French. Why? 

    Beauford: On the occasion of my birth... 

    Interviewer: When you were born... 

    Beauford: At the moment when I was born, a woman with wisdom... 

    Interviewer: A midwife... 

    Beauford: A midwife with my mom, whose maiden name was Beauford. She was from North Carolina in the south of the United States and my mother had developed an affection for her. Because of this I was given the name Beauford. 

     

    i James Baldwin, quoted in Stephen C. Wicks, ed., Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door, Knoxville, 2020, p. 27.

    • Provenance

      The artist
      Private Collection, New York
      Janet Lehr, New York
      Private Collection, New York
      The Shin Collection, New York

    • Exhibited

      New York, Shin Gallery, Amalgamation: Celebrating 10 Years of Shin Gallery, March 3–June 4, 2022

108

Yellow Abstraction

signed, variously inscribed and dated "BEAUFORD DELANEY 1957 Clamart France" on the reverse
oil on canvas
16 3/8 x 13 in. (41.6 x 33 cm)
Painted in 1957.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$70,000 - 100,000 

Sold for $81,900

Contact Specialist

Annie Dolan
Specialist, Head of Day Sale, Morning Session
+1 212 940 1288
adolan@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Morning Session

New York Auction 16 November 2022