Feb 06, 2007 - Sale 2102

Sale 2102 - Lot 86

Price Realized: $ 64,800
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 70,000 - $ 100,000
BEAUFORD DELANEY (1901 - 1979)
Untitled (Yellow Painting).

Oil on linen canvas, 1962. 1777x368 mm; 69 3/4x14 1/2 inches. Signed, titled, dated and inscribed "Paris" and the address "53 Rue..(illegible)" in oil, verso.

Provenance: Ex-collection the artist; John and Chantal Hunt, France; private New York collection.

In 1953 Delaney left New York and moved to Paris, joining an expatriate community of artists and writers including James Baldwin, Henry Miller, Sam Francis, and Bob Thompson. Feeling liberated in this new setting, his paintings quickly moved from representation to pure abstraction. His continued use of the color yellow took on new and greater significance. Delaney believed that various colors had spiritual significance and that the color yellow represented light, healing and redemption. The importance of yellow in his work was the focus of the recent exhibition Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow curated by Richard J. Powell, at the High Museum, Atlanta in 2003. Plagued in the 1960s and '70s by schizophrenia and alcoholism, Delaney was frequently hospitalized, reducing his output although his paintings were featured in many exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Delaney died in 1979 one year after the first retrospective of his work at the Studio Museum in Harlem.