Oct 03 at 12:00 PM - Sale 2680 -
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Sale 2680 - Lot 16

Estimate: $ 250,000 - $ 350,000
BEAUFORD DELANEY (1901 - 1979)
Untitled (Greenwich Village Street, New York.)

Oil on linen canvas, circa 1945-46. 457x546 mm; 18x21½ inches. Signed and dated (indistinctly) in oil, lower right recto. Signed (three times) and inscribed "181 Greene St" (twice)" and "NY" in oil on the stretcher bars, verso.

Provenance: acquired directly from the artist, Professor Kenneth Lash, California and Iowa; thence by descent, private collection, Washington (2006).

Kenneth Lash (1918-1985) was a poet, essayist, university professor, and chair of art and humanities departments. He was a contributor to many literary reviews and journals, including The New Yorker, editor of the New Mexico Quarterly and a longtime contributing editor at the North American Review. Before his service in the US Navy, Lash lived in New York in the early 1940s where he frequented many jazz clubs and after-hours sessions at trumpeter Frankie Newton's Greenwich Village loft, blocks away from Beauford Delaney's studio. Lash was part of a support network of friends and patrons who assisted Delaney both before and after his trip to Paris. In his Delaney biography, Leeming writes that Beauford Delaney mentioned how "my good friend" Kenneth Lash made his trip to Vinalhaven, Maine possible in a June 26, 1946 letter to Henry Miller.

This richly impastoed depiction of the Village is a very scarce and significant example of Beauford Delaney's New York period. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Beauford Delaney moved to New York City in 1929. Delaney was inspired by the vibrant, modern landscape of the city, particularly the parks and streets close to his studio apartment on the top of 181 Greene Street. As early as 1940, his paintings of New York also reflected a new modernist approach. According to Ann E. Gibson, Delaney's cityscapes were "recognizable but hardly realist, his forms knit into a single fabric, often united by a consistently textured surface, held together by integrated nets of color and line coexisting on the surfaces of his paintings."

This expressive painting embodies Beauford Delaney's modernist approach of the 1940s. His depiction of a street corner and the El train line is particularly infused color through a densely layered impasto. Delaney painted several other similar versions of street scenes between 1944 and 1946, often nocturnal views and each with Van Gogh-like swirling brushwork; see Untitled (Night Scene), circa 1944 and Greenwich Village, 1945 (see Canterbury fig. 7 and pl. 8). Here Delaney's impasto unifies the entire space, from the street to the clouds in the sky, and pushes the painting into abstraction. He includes a sole figure as a dark silhouette passing like a specter across the foreground. Delaney would later revisit this New York scene in Paris with his Street Scene, 1968, painted predominantly in yellow. Canterbury pp. 14, 29 and 39; Leeming p. 80.
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