Lovelight: The Art of Beauford Delaney($65.00Value)

Description

The art and life of one of American modernism’s most important painters “Since love of life people and painting are to me the same as long as I can lift a brush my heart and mind remain dedicated and my faith steadfast,” Beauford Delaney (1901–1979) wrote of his existence as an artist. He lived up to these words. For more than fifty years, Delaney devoted himself to painting, moving from his birthplace in Knoxville, Tennessee, to Boston, New York, and eventually Paris in pursuit of artistic mastery. Along the way, he exhibited in the same galleries and museums as Jackson Pollock, Romare Bearden, and Sam Francis and amassed a circle of admirers that included James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Ornette Coleman. Delaney faced tremendous obstacles on his artistic journeys. As a queer Black Southern man who suffered from auditory hallucinations and extreme poverty, Delaney struggled throughout his life. Nonetheless, his luminous paintings suggest hope and even transcendence. Building on his family’s teachings that art constitutes “the immortal sons and daughters of the soul,” Delaney painted a vision of artistic union and posterity that celebrates love in all its forms. Lovelight explores the development of Delaney’s art from his early days in Appalachia through his final years in France. Drawing on extensive archival research, rarely seen images, interviews with Delaney’s friends, and the painter’s own writings, Mary Campbell gives a moving account of an artist whose work ranks among the great achievements of twentieth-century modernism. “In this beautifully written and expertly illustrated book, Mary Campbell gives us a new and extraordinary portrait of a great painter.” —David Leeming, author of Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney “Mary Campbell’s deep dive into Beauford Delaney’s assorted spheres of influence—from post-Reconstruction era Knoxville to his final years in post–World War II café society Paris—offers compelling explanations for the artist’s idiosyncratic yet radiant modernism. Rather than creating analogies between biography and art, Lovelight makes the works themselves—portraits, landscapes, invented subjects, and abstractions—the celestial actors from where Delaney’s chronicles can be intercepted and absorbed.” —Richard J. Powell, author of Colorstruck! Painting, Pigment, Affect “In Lovelight , Mary Campbell approaches Delaney with an insightful and expansive interpretive brush. She fleshes out the contours of the Black Knoxville of his childhood and deftly explores the kaleidoscopic turn of his New York and Paris years, illuminating his journey through abundant and revelatory archival research.” —Adrienne L. Childs, editor of Beauford Delaney: So Much Love and Beauty Mary Campbell is an associate professor of American art history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image .