Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Beauford Delaney
American; 20th-century
Brunswick, ME: Bowdoin College Museum of Art
91%
Untitled. 1960. Oil on canvas
This painting vanishes — there's almost nothing to it. But then, as you look, the yellow-greens start to separate from the pinks, and from the pinks a purple begins to distinguish itself, till eventually a whole world of variegation and movement emerges. When you attune yourself to the infinitesimal tonal variations between the painting's three layers, you notice how steadfast its architecture is, how much surreptitious structure it has: the mustards are denser near the bottom but arc and swoop with surety as they thin out towards the top; the purples compress the pinks and push them up into the picture plane. There's an affinity with Pollock in all of this: Delaney's painting engages the tension, characteristic of modernism, between the physical reality of a picture and the virtuality of the image it conveys, but like Pollock's allover work Delaney's painting does so without much establishing fixed figure-ground relations. It is at once all surface and all depiction. The coexistence of so much inch-by-inch differentiation with such unperturbed unity of presentation is what all painting aspires to. (TFS, 2025)