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piece The Boxer (Fig. 133), exhibited at the Artists for Victory show the year before, was purchased by the Metropolitan Museum, and in 1944 Barthe was the only Black among the artists represented in a show sent to England?die first such exchange during the war.
Barthe's easy facility and conservatism eventually misled him. While Picasso was experimenting with open form and welded sculpture, Barthe failed even to understand the vocabulary of Rodin?s naturalism. Writing of Barthe?s Supplication (Fig. 177), a small piece exhibited in the 1948 Whitney Annual, critic Thomas Hess explained the artist?s difficulties:
Working from the Renaissance tradition of naturalism which led to Rodin's marvelous climax of illusion, Barthe expresses himself through his facsimile of the posed model. But where Rodin created a sculptural vocabulary for naturalism, Barthe makes the naturalism his premise and works towards his ends with ready made means. The relationship between the forms in Supplication is anatomical?the face is made important not by planned movement or form but by its sentimental expression. It appeals to that part of the brain concerned with abstractions of pity and politics, not to the sections connected with the nerves of sight and touch.11
Beauford Delaney (b. 1901)
The ''amazing and invariable?? Beauford Delaney, subject of an impassioned essay by his friend, the writer Henry Miller,32 is considered dean of the Afro-American artists living in Europe.13 Delaney arrived in Paris for a visit in 1954 and has considered it his home ever since. 11 is portraits and large abstractions have been exhibited at several one-man shows in France and Spain. Unfortunately, during the long absence from his New York studio, most of his early paintings were stolen or destroyed. In Paris, Delaney received the kind of attention and honor that was rare for a Black in the United States. When referred to as an expatriate, he responded with a bitterness that is not uncommon among the Blacks living abroad:
Expatriate? It appears to me that in order to be an expatriate one has to be, in some manner, driven from one?s fatherland, from one?s native land. When I left the United States during the 1950?s no such condition was left behind. One must belong before one may then not belong. I belong here in Paris. I am able to realize myself here. I am no expatriate.1'
Beauford Delanev left Knoxville, Tennessee, the city of his birth, at age sixteen to study in Boston.
Although he claims to be largely self-taught, he spent some time absorbing the artistic atmosphere at the Massachusetts Normal Art School, the South Boston School of Art, and the Copley School of Art. He began his career as a portrait painter working in pastels and exhibited with the Harmon Foundation. Through the years his style has developed and matured along with the mainstream of American art. His first one-man show was held at the Artist?s Gallery in New York in 1948. The asymmetrically patterned canvases were described as combining the ?hedonism of Matisse and the compulsive emotions of Van Gogh.? Continued the reviewer:
I [is work has an exotic pulse. Its thick impasto, inverted balance of line, with flat areas of color, and strong, even hues will most Likely provoke immediate judgment. Street scenes and interiors are ornately embellished, their forms exposed somehow as if the epidermis has been stripped off. This odd, hypersensitive surface invests the pictures with intensity without distracting from their gaiety.?
Delaney continued to paint in this manner until the late 1950s, when such works as Composition came to be identified with Abstract Expressionism (Fig. 145). When asked about the social content in his paintings, Delaney replied that ?the artist?s social commitment is to achieve universality in his art, a universality that is a communication to all people.?16
When Henry Miller knew him, Delaney lived on Greene Street in Greenwich Village. He painted Greene Street (PI. 10, p. 110) over and over again, and ?according to Miller?invested the street with "color, mad with color.? He approached each canvas as if it were his first; his enthusiasm was as intense as when he first started painting. Although he did not know where the money for the next tube would come from, he used his paint lavishly. Yet, wrote Miller, ??he never curse[d] his lot because he has never for a moment questioned his fate; and his commitment to succeed as a fine artist, despite the handicap of his color, never left him.?37
Delaney?s paintings are in the collections of manv creative artists and writers who matured with him through the thirties and forties. Among them are Miller, whose portrait he painted; writer James Jones; the great concert and opera singer Marian Anderson; and Al Hirschfeld, the caricaturist. He has exhibited at the Whitney Museum and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, and has been represented bv die RoKo Gallery in Manhattan.1'? Delanev lived for some
The First Black Masters ol Modernism 133