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Lot Essay
“He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.” -James Baldwin
(J. Baldwin, quoted in G. Plimpton, The Writer's Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from the Twentieth Century's Preeminent Writers, New York, 1999, pp. 147-148)
One of the most expressively powerful portraits among Beauford Delaney’s singular oeuvre, The Sage Black has been described as an immediately compelling portrait of the artist’s closest friend and confidant. One of around a dozen identified portraits which Delaney made of the celebrated Black American writer, the present work demonstrates Delaney’s mature expressionist mastery in a magisterial study of color, light, and motion. Fusing the insights of the modern European tradition—running from Vincent van Gogh through Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso—with the innovations of Art Informel, Delaney here articulates a novel and captivating approach to portraiture which emphasizes the profound and the spiritual over his subject’s physical qualities.
Baldwin’s visage takes up almost the entirety of the canvas, his forehead expanding beyond the boundaries of the tableau, accentuating the writer’s eminence and creative prowess. Writing in 1967, the same year the portrait was made, Delaney describes how “we have nothing but profound friendship. Our century is exploding in infinite ways... At such times one must, if speech is impossible, simply be silent. All of us must be ourselves and contain our belief in the healing of wounds which time, we hope, can bring about” (B. Delaney, quoted in R. Cohen, “Shared Subjects,” in Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin, ed. A. J. Elias, Durham, 2025, p. 195). Painted in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, both writer and artist were expatriates in Europe, fleeing from discrimination in the United States. In the face of such adversity, where speech fails, Baldwin and Delaney relied on their profound friendship. The Sage Black speaks within this silence, revealing Baldwin’s subjectivity.
The vivid rounded strokes of color ripple across the surface of The Sage Black, moving from the patterned ground across Baldwin’s visage to create an all-over effect. Delaney’s brush soaks the canvas with an exuberant palette, merging red, green, ochre yellows, and periwinkle blues into a tapestry of polychromic expressivity which pulses across the work. Delaney describes the contours of Baldwin’s face with a viscous, dripping black paint, further debasing the boundaries between figure and ground. Baldwin’s enlarged eyes, painted with the same striking blue and purple as the background, express the writer’s status as a cultural visionary. Delaney ascribed Baldwin as the “witness of the crucial moments of my work” (B. Delaney, quoted in L. Prombaum, “Beaford Delaney’s Repetition Creates,” in Beaford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door., exh. cat., Knoxville Museum of Art, 2020, p. 74). Here Delaney turns from witness to participant, emphasizing what the art historian Levi Prombaum notes of the present work: “If Delaney's many images of Baldwin, The Black Sage represents one of his most powerfully expressive portrayals” (ibid., p. 160).
“I left New York for Paris in 1953, and I have painted with greater freedom ever since. I tried to paint light, different kinds of light, and my paintings has been associated with ‘abstraction.’ But there are no precise limits for me between ‘abstract’ and ‘figurative’ paintings and I have always continued to paint portraits of friends.” -Beauford Delaney
Delaney had commenced an experimental artistic journey into abstraction beginning in the 1950s and finds a potent resolution in the present work. After moving from Paris into suburban Clamart, Delaney increasingly favored the freshness of his vivid palette, the complex treatment of light, and a sense of perpetual mobility within his works. Prombaum describes the trajectory of Delaney’s artistic style, where “an exploration of effects (color) becomes a preoccupation with their forms (light) and great attention to the activity that undergirds them (motion)” (ibid., p. 64). Writing in a Guggenheim Fellowship application in 1966, the year prior to painting the present work, Delaney himself notes how “I left New York for Paris in 1953, and I have painted with greater freedom ever since. I tried to paint light, different kinds of light, and my paintings has been associated with ‘abstraction.’ But there are no precise limits for me between ‘abstract’ and ‘figurative’ paintings and I have always continued to paint portraits of friends” (B. Delaney, quoted in ibid., p. 64).
It is particularly apt that Beaford Delaney’s explorations between abstraction and figuration coalesce definitively in The Sage Black. Baldwin first met Delaney when he was fifteen, and credited the artist as his “spiritual father” to whom “I owe a debt that can never be repaid” (J. Baldwin, quoted in S. C. Wicks, Introduction,” in Beford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door, op. cit., p. 2). Baldwin played a prominent role in Delaney’s move to Paris in 1953, which initiated his exposure to the French modernist tradition and the contemporary developments of abstraction with Art Informel painters such as Jean Dubuffet and Pierre Soulages. Baldwin was thus intimately involved in every aspect of Delaney’s artistic journey—the two even lived together for periods while Delaney explored abstracted landscapes in Clamart. The Sage Black poignantly expresses Delaney’s involvement with the discourse within Art Informel, especially in its investigation of paint’s corporeality and his dissolution of difference between figure and ground.
More significantly, The Sage Black marks an important juncture in the evolution of Delaney’s portraiture practice. As Prombaum notes, “in Delaney’s later portraits, suffused with spirituality and allusions to Christian tradition, this energetic quality manifests as a productive decomposition between a representation and its eminent materiality” (L. Prombaum, op. cit., p. 68). Here a preacher’s son paints a preacher’s son, whom the painter titles a sage. For Delaney, art was an act of love and faith, and here each brushstroke reveals the inner truths beyond Baldwin’s physical appearance. “All of us must be ourselves,” Delaney once wrote, and here Delaney probes his best friend subjectivity, finding himself in its reflection (B. Delaney, quoted in R. Cohen, op. cit., p. 195).
(J. Baldwin, quoted in G. Plimpton, The Writer's Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact, Opinion, Wit, and Advice from the Twentieth Century's Preeminent Writers, New York, 1999, pp. 147-148)
One of the most expressively powerful portraits among Beauford Delaney’s singular oeuvre, The Sage Black has been described as an immediately compelling portrait of the artist’s closest friend and confidant. One of around a dozen identified portraits which Delaney made of the celebrated Black American writer, the present work demonstrates Delaney’s mature expressionist mastery in a magisterial study of color, light, and motion. Fusing the insights of the modern European tradition—running from Vincent van Gogh through Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso—with the innovations of Art Informel, Delaney here articulates a novel and captivating approach to portraiture which emphasizes the profound and the spiritual over his subject’s physical qualities.
Baldwin’s visage takes up almost the entirety of the canvas, his forehead expanding beyond the boundaries of the tableau, accentuating the writer’s eminence and creative prowess. Writing in 1967, the same year the portrait was made, Delaney describes how “we have nothing but profound friendship. Our century is exploding in infinite ways... At such times one must, if speech is impossible, simply be silent. All of us must be ourselves and contain our belief in the healing of wounds which time, we hope, can bring about” (B. Delaney, quoted in R. Cohen, “Shared Subjects,” in Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin, ed. A. J. Elias, Durham, 2025, p. 195). Painted in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, both writer and artist were expatriates in Europe, fleeing from discrimination in the United States. In the face of such adversity, where speech fails, Baldwin and Delaney relied on their profound friendship. The Sage Black speaks within this silence, revealing Baldwin’s subjectivity.
The vivid rounded strokes of color ripple across the surface of The Sage Black, moving from the patterned ground across Baldwin’s visage to create an all-over effect. Delaney’s brush soaks the canvas with an exuberant palette, merging red, green, ochre yellows, and periwinkle blues into a tapestry of polychromic expressivity which pulses across the work. Delaney describes the contours of Baldwin’s face with a viscous, dripping black paint, further debasing the boundaries between figure and ground. Baldwin’s enlarged eyes, painted with the same striking blue and purple as the background, express the writer’s status as a cultural visionary. Delaney ascribed Baldwin as the “witness of the crucial moments of my work” (B. Delaney, quoted in L. Prombaum, “Beaford Delaney’s Repetition Creates,” in Beaford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door., exh. cat., Knoxville Museum of Art, 2020, p. 74). Here Delaney turns from witness to participant, emphasizing what the art historian Levi Prombaum notes of the present work: “If Delaney's many images of Baldwin, The Black Sage represents one of his most powerfully expressive portrayals” (ibid., p. 160).
“I left New York for Paris in 1953, and I have painted with greater freedom ever since. I tried to paint light, different kinds of light, and my paintings has been associated with ‘abstraction.’ But there are no precise limits for me between ‘abstract’ and ‘figurative’ paintings and I have always continued to paint portraits of friends.” -Beauford Delaney
Delaney had commenced an experimental artistic journey into abstraction beginning in the 1950s and finds a potent resolution in the present work. After moving from Paris into suburban Clamart, Delaney increasingly favored the freshness of his vivid palette, the complex treatment of light, and a sense of perpetual mobility within his works. Prombaum describes the trajectory of Delaney’s artistic style, where “an exploration of effects (color) becomes a preoccupation with their forms (light) and great attention to the activity that undergirds them (motion)” (ibid., p. 64). Writing in a Guggenheim Fellowship application in 1966, the year prior to painting the present work, Delaney himself notes how “I left New York for Paris in 1953, and I have painted with greater freedom ever since. I tried to paint light, different kinds of light, and my paintings has been associated with ‘abstraction.’ But there are no precise limits for me between ‘abstract’ and ‘figurative’ paintings and I have always continued to paint portraits of friends” (B. Delaney, quoted in ibid., p. 64).
It is particularly apt that Beaford Delaney’s explorations between abstraction and figuration coalesce definitively in The Sage Black. Baldwin first met Delaney when he was fifteen, and credited the artist as his “spiritual father” to whom “I owe a debt that can never be repaid” (J. Baldwin, quoted in S. C. Wicks, Introduction,” in Beford Delaney and James Baldwin: Through the Unusual Door, op. cit., p. 2). Baldwin played a prominent role in Delaney’s move to Paris in 1953, which initiated his exposure to the French modernist tradition and the contemporary developments of abstraction with Art Informel painters such as Jean Dubuffet and Pierre Soulages. Baldwin was thus intimately involved in every aspect of Delaney’s artistic journey—the two even lived together for periods while Delaney explored abstracted landscapes in Clamart. The Sage Black poignantly expresses Delaney’s involvement with the discourse within Art Informel, especially in its investigation of paint’s corporeality and his dissolution of difference between figure and ground.
More significantly, The Sage Black marks an important juncture in the evolution of Delaney’s portraiture practice. As Prombaum notes, “in Delaney’s later portraits, suffused with spirituality and allusions to Christian tradition, this energetic quality manifests as a productive decomposition between a representation and its eminent materiality” (L. Prombaum, op. cit., p. 68). Here a preacher’s son paints a preacher’s son, whom the painter titles a sage. For Delaney, art was an act of love and faith, and here each brushstroke reveals the inner truths beyond Baldwin’s physical appearance. “All of us must be ourselves,” Delaney once wrote, and here Delaney probes his best friend subjectivity, finding himself in its reflection (B. Delaney, quoted in R. Cohen, op. cit., p. 195).