Sunbathing at the Sert

When radiators don’t do the trick, students having trouble coping with one of the coldest winters on record can bask in the warm colors of the new exhibit at the Sert Gallery in the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts.

“It’s the aesthetic equivalent of sunbathing,” said Harry A. Cooper ’81, who curates modern art for Harvard’s art museums and organized “Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow.”

The exhibit features 26 highly textured, vibrant paintings by African-American modern artist Beauford Delaney. Most are dominated by warm, vivid yellows.

“Delaney believed that yellow had joyful, almost spiritual power,” Cooper says.

Placed against white walls and lit both naturally and artificially, the intense colors trigger a feeling of warmth and provide a visual escape from the dull grays of dirty snow.

Delaney’s show is the first ever retrospective of an African-American artist at Harvard’s art museums.

“I’ve always been interested in Delaney,” Cooper says. “I think that he is under-appreciated.”

And the exhibit, which comes to Harvard after a tour along the east coast organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Ga., is the artist’s first retrospective since the artist passed away in 1979.

The show demonstrates Delaney’s two principal styles of painting—portraiture and abstraction—which are rarely seen together in a show focusing on one artist.

Cooper says he was intrigued by this “very strange” combination of both portraits and total abstractions painted concurrently by Delaney.

Portraiture and abstract works of art often involve contrasting techniques.

But Cooper says several of Delaney’s works integrate the two genres.

“I think the figures come out of the abstraction in Delaney’s works,” he says. “Delaney tends to preserve a clear line between the figure and the background.”

Two monumental canvases—“Marian Anderson,” a colorful portrait painted in 1965, and an extremely yellow, abstract untitled work completed four years earlier—share a free-standing wall in the gallery’s center, demonstrating Delaney’s versatility.

Cooper says the latter is his favorite. It features much less texture and much more yellow paint than the rest of Delaney’s work.

“Yellow is my favorite color,” Cooper explains. “And this painting is the yellowest painting in the exhibit.”

The asymmetrical organization of unbalanced abstract components of the work also sets it apart from Delaney’s other paintings.

“There’s something very liquid and floating about it which makes it very different from all the other paintings,” Cooper says. “You can float into the image.”

Delaney created aesthetic visual effects by integrating color and texture in his oil paintings. He built up many layers of paint, called impasto.

In a highly-textured abstract work from 1962, also untitled, Cooper says there’s “a sort of granular texture that we feel through the eye.”

Juxtapositions and layers of vivid orange, bright yellow and magnificent violet brushstrokes are trademarks of Delaney’s work.

“Because of the way the light falls on it, the texture creates a grain of light and dark,” says Cooper. Although the collection itself has remained largely the same throughout its tour, Cooper meticulously planned the lighting, design and installation in the Sert Gallery.

Delaney interweaves contrasting colors to make the hues more vibrant.

“It is the same principle as pointillism,” Cooper says. “The result, optically, will be very vivid.”

In “Autumn,” completed in 1965, Delaney interspersed oranges, pinks, reds and yellows, and builds up layers of oil paint on the canvas.

Throughout his life Delaney struggled with mental illness and poverty. In the 1930s and 1940s, the artist’s close friends Ella Fitzgerald and James Baldwin inspired him with their musical and literary works. The Sert show includes several of the cityscapes of New York painted during this time.

Delaney is one of few African-American artists associated with abstract expressionism.

He explored the emotional intensity of abstract works after his experience with racism caused him to move from New York to Paris in 1953. Delaney continued to paint portraits after leaving the United States, depicting Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington and Marian Anderson.

Delaney was among friends in Paris, where he continued painting and formed friendships with other artists and writers.

He was repeatedly hospitalized as he suffered from schizophrenia and alcoholism in the 1960s and 70s, and his productivity declined until his death in 1979.

Despite the hardships, Delaney showed remarkable perseverance in creating warm and spiritual works.

“He was well-trained and despite how primitive some of his drawing looks, he was a very skillful handler of paint,” Cooper says. “Reproductions of these paintings are basically dead because they are flat.”

—“Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow” will be on display at the Sert Gallery in the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts until May 4.

—Staff writer Christopher W. Platts can be reached at platts@fas.harvard.edu