Beauford Delaney
(American,1901-1979)
Untitled,1960
Gouache
Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York

An Artistic Friendship: Beauford Delaney and Lawrence Calcagno
February 27ÐMay 13, 2001

This exhibition examines the close artistic and personal friendship between two important American artists of the twentieth century. At first glance, Beauford Delaney and Lawrence Calcagno might seem like an unlikely pair. Delaney (1901-1979), a black American from Knoxville, Tennessee, spent most of his mature life as an expatriate artist in Paris. Lawrence Calcagno (1913-1993), a white American from northern California, spent much of his peripatetic career in the U.S. and in Europe in search of a place to call home.

The two became friends in Paris in 1953 and remained close over the next twenty years until Delaney's deteriorating mental health removed him from his orbit of friends and family. Delaney and Calcagno shared many things in common. Both men committed themselves wholeheartedly to lyrical abstraction, though Delaney's work was ultimately influenced more by Claude Monet's fluid water lily paintings than by the color-field painters, who were so important in Calcagno's formation as an artist. Both men shared an interest in the philosophical underpinnings of their abstract work. Calcagno's abstract "landscapes of the mind"—with their recognizable and consistent horizons—derived in part from the artist's sense of the universal, yet mysterious, harmony of nature. For Delaney, abstraction gave form to the "higher power" of light in the world, a light which, according to his close friend James Baldwin, "held the power to illuminate, even to redeem and reconcile and heal." Both men experienced the power of melancholia (in Delaney's case, the debilitating effects of mental illness), and both understood well the social isolation accompanying their homosexuality.

In honor of the centennial of Delaney's birth, An Artistic Friendship: Beauford Delaney and Lawrence Calcagnowill bring together some fifteen works on paper, many of them from a local collection. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with color illustrations and will travel to the Hampton University Museum in late summer 2001.

Lawrence Calcagno
(American, 1913-1993)
Unititled,1956
Watercolor
Calcagno estate

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