For Beauford Delaney, drawing was both a sanctuary and a space for experimentation. Through his works on paper, he could explore ideas with intimacy and spontaneity, yet this vital area of his oeuvre has been largely overlooked. In the Medium of Life: The Drawings of Beauford Delaney marks New York's first major Delaney museum exhibition in over thirty years and the first ever focused on his drawings—a medium central to his artistic practice.

The exhibition features about ninety works on paper spanning key periods of his career, as well as works on canvas and an array of ephemera—documentary photographs, correspondence, exhibition brochures, and press clippings—that contextualize his unique artistic trajectory. 

Born in 1901 in Knoxville, Tennessee, he grew up in the segregated South and studied fine art at the Massachusetts Normal School in Boston in the late 1920s. By 1929, he had moved to New York, where he continued his artistic practice at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, producing realistic portraits and cubist-inflected street scenes of the Greenwich Village neighborhood where he lived.

In 1953, at the urging of his friend, James Baldwin, Delaney moved to Paris, the city where he would spend the rest of his life. In Paris, Delaney drew and painted portraits, while at the same time, he developed an all-over calligraphic abstract painting style. For two decades, he painted abstract and figurative works simultaneously, sometimes combining both languages by inserting barely visible figures into abstract compositions, or by working up backgrounds full of abstract incidence that often competed with the fully realized portraits embedded within them. 

Writing in The New York Times, Will Heinrich says, “The 81 works and eight original sketchbooks in this extremely beguiling show demonstrate that whatever was happening elsewhere in his life, the pulsing heart of Delaney’s work was the intimate, tantalizing, constantly deferred flirtation of color and line — something on clearest display in his drawings….

"The best works in the show are those in which line and color finally meet — a series of gouaches and watercolors that Delaney began making after a 1961 breakdown. He called them his “Rorschach tests.” In one untitled example from 1961 (left), a tumultuous purple shadow, surrounded by more purple wisps, hunches across a sheet of paper as if struggling against some force trying to thin it out. In another, from 1963, a two and a half foot-tall sheet of Arches paper tall is entirely filled with wriggly lines. …These lines overlap one another so much, and their edges are so cloudy and loose, that they hardly look like lines at all: They’re pretty much pure color.

Through Sept. 14, The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, New York, NY Info