NOWTRUTH!!! BECAUSE WE NEED TRUTH AND JUSTICE FROM THE COURTS MORE NOW THAN EVER, NOT HYPERPOLITICIZED, NUANCED LAW COMPLETE WITH THE REQUISITE NARRATIVE!! (LAW= Politically manufactured, orchestrated, strategic opinions, rulings, and orders for injustice to hide behind!)
In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a federal court may not consider new evidence outside the state-court record in deciding whether the state violated a person’s Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel at trial.
Shinn v. Ramirez addresses the cases of two men sentenced to death in Arizona after they received constitutionally ineffective assistance at trial.
Judges are Politicians, just hoods in black robes!
Barry Jones asserts that he was wrongly sentenced to death for the sexual assault and murder of his girlfriend’s four-year-old daughter. After his court-appointed lawyer failed to investigate and present readily available medical evidence showing that the child was not with Mr. Jones when her injuries were sustained, he claimed his rights were violated and a new trial was required.
Under Arizona law, state postconviction review was Mr. Jones’s first opportunity to challenge his trial lawyer’s ineffectiveness. But the state court appointed him a postconviction lawyer who did not even meet the minimum qualifications required by state law. That lawyer likewise failed to investigate and did not raise the claim that trial counsel was ineffective for failing to challenge the State’s medical evidence.
Not until Mr. Jones was appointed competent counsel in federal habeas proceedings did he have the chance to present the medical evidence, which the federal court relied on to find that both his trial and postconviction lawyers were ineffective. The court granted him a new trial, which was upheld by a unanimous panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of appeals.
In a second case, David Ramirez was sentenced to death in 1990 after his trial lawyer failed to investigate and present evidence of his intellectual disabilities, which might have prevented imposition of the death penalty. His postconviction lawyer likewise failed to investigate his intellectual disability and did not argue that his trial counsel was ineffective.
The federal court appointed the Arizona Federal Public Defender to represent Mr. Ramirez, and they submitted evidence showing that he “grew up eating on the floor and sleeping on dirty mattresses in houses filthy with animal feces; that Ramirez’s mother would beat him with electrical cords; and that Ramirez displayed multiple apparent developmental delays, including ‘delayed walking, potty training, and speech’ and inability to maintain basic hygiene or to use utensils to eat.” The Ninth Circuit held the new evidence was substantial and ordered an evidentiary hearing.
In both cases, the federal courts relied on Martinez v. Ryan and Trevino v. Thaler, which held that a person whose postconviction lawyer fails to adequately challenge their trial lawyer’s ineffective performance may raise the ineffectiveness claim for the first time in federal court. These cases provided a critical safeguard for people sentenced to death who had deficient lawyers both at trial and in postconviction proceedings.
Arizona prosecutors appealed the Ninth Circuit’s decisions in Mr. Ramirez and Mr. Jones’s cases. They argued in the Supreme Court that the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), a federal law passed in 1996 that severely restricts incarcerated and death-sentenced people’s access to federal habeas corpus review, bars a federal court from considering any evidence that was not presented in state court, even if Martinez and Trevinoallow the ineffectiveness claim to be raised in federal court.
At oral argument, Justices Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts questioned the inherent conflict in Arizona’s position, with Justice Thomas noting that it would be “rather odd” to “excuse a default under Martinez, but not allow the prisoner to make his underlying claim or develop his evidence.”
Notwithstanding these concerns, the conservative majority adopted Arizona’s position and effectively gutted the Court’s precedent in service of finality and deference to state courts.
The ruling “all but overrules” Martinez and Trevino, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan. It is “perverse” and “illogical” to hold that a “petitioner cannot logically be faultless for not bringing a claim because of postconviction counsel’s ineffectiveness, yet at fault for not developing its evidentiary basis for exactly the same reason,” she wrote.
Ineffective assistance claims “frequently turn on errors of omission: evidence that was not obtained, witnesses that were not contacted, experts who were not retained, or investigative leads that were not pursued,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “Demonstrating that counsel failed to take each of these measures by definition requires evidence beyond the trial record.”
Barring such evidence from being developed or considered in federal court, she wrote, renders Martinez “meaningless in many, if not most, cases,” because petitioners will not be able to prove the ineffectiveness claims that Martinez allows them to raise.
“For the subset of these petitioners who receive ineffective assistance both at trial and in state postconviction proceedings, the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee is now an empty one,” the dissent concluded. “Many, if not most, individuals in this position will have no recourse and no opportunity for relief.”
The decision means that Mr. Jones and Mr. Ramirez, “whose trial attorneys did not provide even the bare minimum level of representation required by the Constitution[,] may be executed because forces outside of their control prevented them from vindicating their constitutional right to counsel,” Justice Sotomayor wrote.
And in addition to them, the decision “will leave many people who were convicted in violation of the Sixth Amendment to face incarceration or even execution without any meaningful chance to vindicate their right to counsel.”
“As long as there are reformers in the Russian Federation and the other states leading the journey toward democracy’s horizon, our strategy must be to support them. And our place must be at their side.”
-President Bill Clinton on the re-election of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1995-
Russian President Boris Yeltsin at White House with President Bill Clinton
Our HISTORIC Hammer “Rap-The-Vote Concert Series” Secured Re-Election of Russian President Boris Yeltsin AND Spawned Rise of Vladamir Putin to Power!
This 1995 revisited article was written strictly from a WORLD HISTORIC perspective about how our “WORLD ALTERING” Urban-American, western style, political campaign strategy utilizing M. C. Hammer in a “Rap-The-Vote Concert Series” secured the 18-45 voter turnout and the re-election of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1995 with the “Our Home Is Russia” (NDR), a Russian liberal political party. Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim devised a strategic plan, executive produced, produced, filmed and broadcast on Russian National TV a series of concerts in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and the WORLD. This campaign tactic was their most effective strategy, greatest strength- uniquely different and vastly superior to anything Russia had ever witnessed. This comprehensive, targeted attack with our expertise well grounded in modern focused campaigning strategy, advertising, marketing, and promotions was trumpeted for saving Russian democracy with Yeltsin’s re-election ensuring continuity in the Democratic evolution of Russia and securing world peace. The television programming was so successful that it has regularly run on air since 1995!
This strategy was trumpted for saving Russian democracy with Yeltsin’s re-election ensuring continuity in the Democratic evoultion of Russia and securing world peace.
The television programming was so successful that it has regularly run on air since 1995!
THIS BLACK HISTORY IS WORLD HISTORY!
THIS BLACK POLITICS IS WORLD POLITICS!
At the time we began our concerts and campaign events over the weeks in St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin was then Deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, organized the St. Petersburg branch of the Party Our Home Is Russia, was it’s Chairman, and led the campaign issue of the party in the elections to the Duma that led to his rise to power and being named President of Russia by Boris Yeltsin.
After our concerts and campaign events over the weeks ending in Moscow, our overwhelmingly positive Polling numbers cemented the campaign an incredible success and this strategy was heralded world wide by political pundits as “incredibly brilliant”, “ a global coup”, “a miraculous event in history”, a “triumph for democratic reform” and “universally invaluable” in it’s effect of being “a savior”, as Yeltsin was the only alternative to guaranteeing the West’s and the World’s political, economic, and military security to carry out their reform agenda.
BUT, with a Western audience in mind, but I must add an important clarification that I do not aim to justify the authoritarian tendency or the confrontational policies undertaken by Russia, EVER. However, a sober conversation about missed opportunities, of what went wrong, requires a scrutinizing evaluation not only of Russian, but also of the rest of the World, including China, North Korea, South America, Israel and the United States.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has been traversing its own, often difficult path toward independent development. The trajectory of the country’s development was mostly determined by internal factors, particularly concerning the balance of power among various sections of the Russian elite.
For Russia, the early 1990s were one of those critical junctures when many paths were open. The politically active section of society defeated a decrepit totalitarian regime, hoping to restore Russia’s full participation in the community of developed states in the global north. In those days, the most pressing question in Russian society appeared to concern identity: Who are we? In searching for an answer, many members of the reformist elite waited for the West to extend a hand in friendship, to offer assistance as equals.
Accordingly, many among the Russian elite and society at large answered that question by attempting to reclassify their country as a member of the “first world.” It was the world Andrei Sakharov dreamed that Russia could join, as yesterday’s foe and tomorrow’s friend. That move, they hoped, could lead to Russia’s deeper integration into the West’s political, economic, and security structures, such as the EU, NATO, WHO, Schengen Zone, and the World.
Such a move, had it been successful, would not have prevented a nationalist backlash in subsequent years but might at least have limited it: elites integrated into Western systems would have valued the advantages of their position. And if, regardless of those achievements, Russia’s leaders had still opted for isolationism, then the world would be discussing “Russia’s Brexit” and its departure from the EU. It would not be discussing the invasion of Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, wars in Georgia and Chechnya, and the evisceration of constitutional freedoms in Russia.
“Our Home Is Russia” (NDR) was a Russian liberal political party founded in 1995, existed to 2006, by former Gazprom chairman, then Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. It was a liberal, centrist political movement, founded for the purpose of rallying more technocratic-reformist (right-wing) government supporters. At the time of its founding, Chernomyrdin had the backing of Russian president Boris Yeltsin along with numerous large financial institutions such as Association of Russian Banks, and major companies such as Gazprom, of which he was formerly the chairman.
Viktor Chernomyrdin, served as Russia’s prime minister under then President Boris Yeltsin from 1992 to 1998, a turbulent period of economic hardship and political turmoil as a bankrupted Russia struggled to recreate itself as a democracy after the Soviet collapse, developing as a market economy while throwing off communism and engineered the creation of Gazprom, now the world’s biggest gas company.
Previously Yeltsin tacitly supported Russia’s Choice as the preferred party to win the December 1993 elections for the Duma and carry out the reform agenda that the late Supreme Soviet had stalled. However, the failure of Russia’s Choice and other reform-oriented parties in that election forced Yeltsin to change his strategy, once again relying on Chernomyrdin, his emerging “Party of Power,” the industrial-military complex, the armed forces, and the KGB–to the detriment of the legislature and Russian democracy.
The leaders of the Democratic Russia Movement, the coalition that pressed Mikhail Gorbachev to annul the communist monopoly on power in February 1990, that launched Yeltsin into the Russian presidency in June 1991, and that then gave birth to the Russia’s Choice party.
The movement attracted the sympathies and interests of many prominent members of the ruling elite of Russia, and NDR was thus nicknamed “the party of power”. It was also known as the party of the Oligarchs, the position previously identified with another political party, Democratic Choice of Russia. Two other parties were interested in cooperating with NDR after its foundation: parts of the Agrarian Party of Russia and Democratic Choice of Russia. Together their platform would promote “freedom, property, and legality”, and would favor such policies as reducing the state’s role in the economy, support for small businesses, privatization of agriculture, military cutbacks and sought “a normal life in Russia” and peace in Chechnya after the First Chechen War. However, after Chernomyrdin’s candidacy for a second term as Prime Minister was in 1998 rejected by the Duma, Our Home – Russia declined the other parties’ bid for cooperation.
Boris Yeltsin wanted to establish a two-party system in 1995 after the American model and advocated the establishment of a center-right and a left- centrist electoral blocs. Yeltsin’s aim was on the one hand to clip the extreme parties on the political fringe, even at the head of the Communist Party Gennady Zyuganov KPRF away from the power. On the other hand, Yeltsin wanted to create functional, loyal and non-ideological parties to consolidate its power and stability of the country.
The main parties competing in the 1996 Russian Duma elections learned a lesson from 1993 and made wider use of popular artistic and sports figures ¡in advertisements, for endorsements, and as candidates for office. Chernomyrdin’s party even used the American rapper M. C. Hammer. These popular figures help establish a party’s image. To this day, most of Russia’s parties center around personalities and not platforms, and they have yet to consolidate loyal, definable constituencies.
The 1999 Duma elections also followed this trend. The greatest vote-getter was Yedinstvo, a party formed only weeks prior to the elections, which had no political or economic platforms and whose only overt identity was support for Vladimir Putin, the popular prime minister. Therefore, the image that Russian parties convey on television can prove more crucial than in established democracies. This means that whoever has the slickest ad, appeals to emotions (such as Yedinstvo did with the war in Chechnya), and boasts the most charismatic personality often wins the vote.
Some analysts explain Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s surprise success in the 1993 election by his adept use of symbolism and sleek soundbites, as others have partly attributed Yeltsin’s victory in the June 1991 Russian presidential elections to wide use of popular symbolism, as advised by the Krieble Institute of Washington.
The “Rap-The-Vote Concert Series” was particularly strange given Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin cherished his stodgy, button-down reputation. He was not young, he is not funky, and he most definitely does not “rock the house.” And that is why it was a bit surprising that Chernomyrdin’s campaign hired the American rapper M. C. Hammer to enliven the image of “Our Home Is Russia”, the centrist political party.
M. C. Hammer in Russian “Rap-The-Vote Concert Series”
Against a glowing red, white and blue “Our Home Is Russia” backdrop at the Rossiya concert hall, Hammer bellowed, “We feel like bustin’ loose!”.
The campaign for Russia’s parliamentary elections, which were held on Dec. 17, 1995, has begun, with about 5,000 candidates struggling for the attention of voters. And although almost all of them are wrapping themselves in patriotism, nationalism and fierce anti-Western slogans, their campaigns have gone completely Hollywood.
In television advertising, sex, money and fear-mongering are far more prominent this year than issues and platforms. Although Russia has experimented with American-style campaign tactics before, this campaign is beginning to look like a Soviet propagandist’s worst caricature of the American democratic process.
Some politicians, like the extreme nationalist Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, are selling themselves with the kind of erotic imagery usually reserved for car advertisements and music videos. Others, including the popular nationalist general, Aleksandr Lebed, are using slick, scary spots about crime and corruption. And almost every party is using celebrities. Pop stars and actors are not just endorsing candidates, they are running for office on almost every party list.
Even the Communists are not immune to showbiz. Nikolai Gubenko, a popular actor and theater director, is a top party candidate.
“Except for the Communist Party, there is such weak party identity in Russia that candidates have to sell personalities, not political platforms,” said Michael McFaul, an expert on Russian politics at Stanford University. “It becomes Hollywood glitzy – what personality can make us famous?”
Our Home Is Russia is known as the “party of power” because it is made up of government officials, is backed by the major Russian banks and has political clout and money, but it has fared poorly in most public opinion polls.
The party has recruited Nikita Mikhalkov, the Oscar-winning actor in “Burnt by the Sun” and the movie’s director, as well as Ludmila Zykina, a famous anthem singer who was the Soviet Kate Smith.
Its managers are chasing the vote of the disaffected youth in a way that would make Gary Hart blush.
“We have to use different, unusual means to wake the voters up,” said Yuri Shuvalov, 30, a campaign strategist.
The state-owned television and radio stations, including ORT, Russia’s largest network, which was formerly state-owned and is now partly owned by a consortium of banks sympathetic to the government, will each give free airtime to all parties – a maximum of one hour a month. They also will sell additional, paid, airtime to campaigns, but ORT has determined that candidates and parties can only buy three minutes of additional airtime. Candidates and their parties are free to buy airtime on Russia’s private networks, but only ORT is broadcast nationwide.
If many of the candidate’s paid advertisements look like flashy MTV videos, the taped appeals on free airtime that began appearing on Tuesday looked more like late-night public-access television. Politicians like Yegor T. Gaidar of the democratic Russia’s Choice party, and Ivan Rybkin, the speaker of Parliament, running with his own centrist party, fumbled with their notes, fidgeted in their pockets and looked in the wrong cameras.
Though all the major parties are producing slick television advertisements that concentrate on image more than substance, Zhirinovsky still leads the pack. His first television advertisement, broadcast on the Moscow channel, features a sexy cabaret singer, purring a love song to him (“The world would be so boring without you/you are my idol’”) as she teasingly unzips her blouse. Behind her, a giant screen flickers with clips of Zhirinovsky in action, including the time he flung a glass of orange juice in the face of his opponent during a televised debate.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin
Vladimir Putin was then Deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, who became president of Russia, organized in 1995, the St. Petersburg branch of the Party Our House Russia, was it’s Chairman, and led the campaign issue of the party in the elections to the Duma.
Not necessarily for OHR, of course, but the bloc’s name was prominent on the publicity posters and its deputy chairman in St. Petersburg Alexander Prokhorenko agreed that the existence of OHR was likely to penetrate the minds of MC Hammer fans along with his music.
The concert was aimed to encourage the city’s apolitical young people to vote. “I don’t believe that thinking people could go to a concert and then immediately vote for OHR,” he said. “But at least they will start to wonder who we are.”
Free concert tickets were distributed to the city’s schools, higher education institutes, military academies and youth clubs. “This should be an election for the generation aged between 20 and 40,” Mr. Prokhorenko said. “It must determine its own fate or else the development of Russia on general world lines could slow down.”
He feared that if young people stayed at home on election day and did not support democratic forces then there could be a repeat of the 1993 picture where three-quarters of the electorate did not vote “and only afterwards complain about decisions that are taken. It is obvious that Duma deputies do not represent the majority of people.”
“We are not a political party, we are a social movement,” said Mr Prokhorenko. “We do not have the organizational structures of a political party and there is no official membership system, you just announce that you are a member of our movement,” he continued.
St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak declared his support for OHR, and his wife Ludmilla Narusova was a candidate on the bloc’s federal list.
Mr. Prokhorenko himself is a deputy in the City Assembly. Nevertheless he denied that OHR deserved the oft-quoted label “party of power.” “That is a stereotype which is not correct,” he said. “The essence of any party is the aims it sets itself, and only after that the people who participate in it. “Our purpose is to get the largest possible number of professionally prepared, experienced politicians elected to the Duma.”
In that case, it would have seemed logical for OHR to unite with other democratic parties in opposition to communists and ultra-nationalists.
Mr. Prokhorenko said he did not think so, as Russia had been a totalitarian country for so long that it was time for some freedom of choice.
“The fact that we have democrats of the Rybkin, Yavlinsky, Gaidar and Chernomyrdin types is an expression of Russian minds,” he said. “Maybe it’s not very useful for the country, but it’s objective.”
Former Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin was laid to rest after an emotional eulogy by Vladimir Putin.
Former Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin was laid to rest after an emotional eulogy by Vladimir Putin. The usually tough and sharp-tongued Putin, the current prime minister, spoke at his funeral service and at one point he paused and appeared to be struggling to hold back tears. His voice trembled as he said: “We will miss Viktor. We will hold his memory in our hearts and in our work.”
THE REST, – AS THEY SAY-,
IS BLACK HISTORY, WORLD HISTORY!
as BLACK POLITICS IS WORLD POLITICS!
Abdul-Jalil
THE MEDIA AND POLITICAL RESPONSE TO THE “RAP THE VOTE CONCERT SERIES”
November 1995- M. C. Hammer in Russia, The Re-election of Russian President Boris Yeltsin by “Our Home Is Russia”, Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin’s Political Party
Prime Minister Chernomyrdin’s party was struggling to distance their leader from the unpopularity of the Government he headed, resolved to using western style campaign strategy. “Our Home” promised economic stability and continuation of the Democratic course of Yeltsin’s government.
In November 1995 Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim executive produced, produced, filmed and broadcast on Russian National TV a series of concerts in St. Petersburg and Moscow by MC Hammer in an urban style, “Rap-The-Vote” to secure the 18-45 voter turnout and re-election of President Boris Yeltsin. Polling after the concerts was overwhelmingly positive..
“Hammer is our father and rap is a very serious subject for me and if Chernomyrdin can give us Hammer then we will give him our vote.” said Oleg, an 18-year old Russian rap fan in attendance.
Being Prime Minister gave Chernomyrdin a huge advantage in access to Russian voters, with slick campaign posters, he told AP “we are using American pop music performances to drum up support among Russian youth for his political campaign”; the video scenes showed M.C. Hammer performing. Chernomyrdin’s travels around Russia in his capacity as Prime Minister, but looked more like the political campaign trail of an American President.
This strategy was trumpeted as “world altering” for saving Russian democracy with Yeltsin’s re-election ensuring continuity in the evolution of Russia and securing world peace.
This strategy was heralded world wide by political pundits as “incredibly brilliant”, a “triumph for democratic reform” and “universally invaluable” in it’s effect of having “saved” Russian democracy, as Yeltsin was the only alternative in ensuring continuity in the evolution of Russia and securing world peace.
This coup, a miraculous event in history, was depicted and canonized in a 2004 film
“Spinning Boris” starring Jeff Goldblum, Anthony LaPaglia and Liev Schreiber.
“Spinning Boris” The Best President of Russia America Ever Had ..L. A. Times Review
Jeff Goldblum, Anthony LaPaglia and Liev Schreiber star as a trio of elite American political campaign operatives who were hired in secret to manage Russian President Boris Yeltsin’s election campaign in 1996. He’s polling at 6 percent with the election a few months away. First, they must get someone’s attention; they succeed finally with Yeltsin’s daughter, then it’s polling, focus groups, messages and spin. Even as Yeltsin’s numbers go up, they are unsure who hired them and if Yeltsin’s allies have a different plan in mind than victory. When the going gets toughest, they put a spin on their stake: democracy and capitalism must win. They orchestrate the most spectacular political comeback of the twentieth century – as they “sold” Boris Yeltsin to the Russian public gaining Yeltsin’s successful re-election. http://www.box.net/shared/sc1l8qycmt
The Re-election of Russian President Boris Yeltsin at Excerpts of “Clinton Secrets” in a book by JOHN DIAMOND
The campaign tactic was their most effective strategy, greatest strength- uniquely different and vastly superior to anything Russia had ever witnessed. This strategic plan with our expertise well grounded in modern American campaigning got Yeltsin re-elected. This was simply a matter of fact that he was the best the modern world could get compared to the alternative communist and he was fully supported by the U.S.
A State Department memorandum, marked “confidential,’’ summarized then President Bill Clinton’s meeting with Yeltsin at a summit in Egypt, where Clinton told Yeltsin he ”wanted to make sure that everything the United States did would have a positive impact and nothing should have a negative impact’’ on Yeltsin’s re-election. The memo added the U. S. wanted an upcoming summit with the Russian leader to be successful to “reinforce everything that Yeltsin had done.’’
Excerpts of “Clinton Secrets” in a book by JOHN DIAMOND, Associated Press Writer
Black, American-born, a woman, and arguably best known for her exotic dancing: Josephine Baker hardly fits the profile of France’s historical heroes. But today, the performer from Saint Louis, Missouri, was granted one of France’s highest honors: A tomb in the Pantheon in Paris, the country’s monument to its heroes. There have been only 80 people granted the honor since the tradition began in Napoleonic times. Baker is the first Black woman honored at the Pantheon, according to the Elysee Palace. She is also only the sixth woman, which includes scientist Marie Curie and politician Simone Veil.
I was fortunately able to be living in Paris and Europe in 1971-72 with all the many other African American’s experiencing the same creative mind/life altering “expatriate” life, with the INCOMPARABLE Josephine Baker and James Baldwin.
Ms. Josephine Baker- Always the Charmer, mannering in such a way as to suggest a playful attraction; flirtatious, with a disarming coquettish smile that melted the coldest of men. Yet she was more seductive with her intelligence, intoxicating with her infinte logic obviously gleaned for her years of unimaginable suffering beneath that gorgeous armoured exterior! A “DEVINE knowledge” I came to realize and call it as that “DIVINUS”– GOD CONSCIOUS/CONSCIENCE DRIVEN MANDATORY PREREQUISITE seemed to guide us all through our universe challenging academic exchanges of enlightenment usually convened by Beauford Delaney! Without it, you had not admission ticket, and ALL privileges were denied!
James Baldwin, “Jimmy” as we called him, was “sub-conscientiously” EVERYWHERE (America and around the World) at ALL of the important events of the Civil Rights Movement – rarely in the background. He ALWAYS presented a vivid drama, intermingling the personal and the political, as one of the most enigmatic figures in 20th-century American history. They both, Josephine Baker and Baldwin, and ALL those in our circle at the time, including and especially Beauford Delaney, were exceptionally intelligent, gregarious and charismatic, artistic in a highly unusual visionary way- but were denied their TRUE place in HISTORY- until after their deaths, but stilled strolled in the limelight denied them for various “excuses” as reason THEN that still exist TODAY- TOO INTELLIGENT, TOO BLACK, TOO POLITICAL, TOO WELLSPOKEN/OUTSPOKEN, and some just “gay”.
Beauford Delaney’s Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim, c.1971
I had the DISTINCT HONOR of having my Portrait painted by Beauford Delaney- “Portraitist of the Famous”, the most important African-American artists of the 20th century! He has painted portraits of Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Emperor Halle Selassie of Ethiopia, W.E.B. Du Bois, John F. Kennedy, Salvadore Dalí, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, Robert Kennedy, Marian Anderson, Jacob Lawrence, Ella Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Charlie Parker, James Jones, Jean Genet, Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, W.C. Handy, Countee Cullen, Henry Miller, Jean-Claude Killy, Herb Gentry, Alain Locke, Cy Twombly, Sterling Brown, Georgia O’Keeffe, Augusta Savage, Stuart Davis, Richard A. Long, John Koenig, Jackson Pollock, Vassili Pikoula, Henri Chahine, Lawrence Calcagno, Elaine DeKooning, Palmer C. Hayden, Darthea Speyer, Herbert Gentry, Ed Clark, James Jones. Henry Miller, Richard Wright, Jacob Lawrence, to name a few!
Delaney was a respected elder of the Harlem Renaissance crowd. His intimate portraits from this period show his beliefs of love, respect and equality between all people. In this time he became a “spiritual father” to writer James Baldwin.
Baker — a dancer, singer and wartime spy — is a household name in France. Her scantily-clad dancehall routines — often playing on colonial tropes — are synonymous with the wild reverie of the 1920s. Although less well-known in her American homeland, she was proud of her humble roots in Saint Louis and later in life became a fierce advocate for civil rights, speaking at the 1963 March on Washington.
The coffin with soils from the US, France and Monaco is carried towards the Panthéon monument, France, Tuesday. Credit: Christophe Ena/AP
Baker’s voice resonated through streets of Paris’ famed Left Bank as recordings from her extraordinary career kicked off an elaborate ceremony at the domed Pantheon monument. Baker joined other French luminaries honored at the site, including philosopher Voltaire, scientist Marie Curie and writer Victor Hugo.
Military officers from the Air Force carried her cenotaph along a red carpet that stretched for four blocks of cobblestoned streets from the Luxembourg Gardens to the Pantheon. Baker’s military medals lay atop the cenotaph, which was draped in the French tricolor flag and contained soil from her birthplace in Missouri, from France, and from her final resting place in Monaco. Her body stayed in Monaco at the request of her family.
French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to “a war hero, fighter, dancer, singer; a Black woman defending Black people but first of all, a woman defending humankind. American and French. Josephine Baker fought so many battles with lightness, freedom, joy.”
On Tuesday afternoon, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke at a ceremony at the Pantheon to mark Baker’s interment. Though her body remains buried in Monaco at the request of her family, a coffin was entombed at the site bearing handfuls of dirt from four important locations in her life — Saint-Louis, Paris, Milandes — the site of her chateau home — and Monaco. This is not the first time that the honor has been bestowed this way, according to the Elysee. French Resistance fighters Genevieve de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Germaine Tillion are represented by caskets with earth. The date of her interment also holds significance, marking the anniversary of when she received French citizenship in 1937. Macron tweeted a video celebrating Baker’s life Tuesday, in which he said she had “all the courage, all the boldness, she’s quite synthetic of what it means to be French.” Hailing her fight for universalism, her war-time acts, and her “absolute freedom,” Macron added in the video that Baker “is quite inspiring.”
“Josephine Baker, you are entering into the Pantheon because, (despite) born American, there is no greater French (woman) than you,” he said.
Baker was also the first American-born citizen and the first performer to be immortalized into the Pantheon.
She is not only praised for her world-renowned artistic career but also for her active role in the French Resistance during World War II, her actions as a civil rights activist and her humanist values, which she displayed through the adoption of her 12 children from all over the world. Nine of them attended Tuesday’s ceremony among the 2,000 guests.
“Mum would have been very happy,” Akio Bouillon, Baker’s son, said after the ceremony. “Mum would not have accepted to enter into the Pantheon if that was not as the symbol of all the forgotten people of history, the minorities.”
Bouillon added that what moved him the most were the people who gathered along the street in front of the Pantheon to watch.
“They were her public, people who really loved her,” he said.
The tribute ceremony started with Baker’s song “Me revoilà Paris” (“Paris, I’m Back”). The French army choir sang the French Resistance song, prompting strong applause from the public. Her signature song “J’ai deux amours” (“Two Loves”) was then played by an orchestra accompanying Baker’s voice on the Pantheon plaza.
During a light show displayed on the monument, Baker could be heard saying “I think I am a person who has been adopted by France. It especially developed my humanist values, and that’s the most important thing in my life.”
The homage included Martin Luther King’s famed “I have a dream” speech. Baker was the only woman to speak before him at the 1963 March on Washington.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Baker became a megastar in the 1930s, especially in France, where she moved in 1925 as she sought to flee racism and segregation in the United States.
Josephine Baker is the sixth woman to be commemorated in the Panthéon. Credit: Siegfried Modola/Getty Images
“The simple fact to have a Black woman entering the pantheon is historic,” Black French scholar Pap Ndiaye, an expert on U.S. minority rights movements, told The Associated Press.
“When she arrived, she was first surprised like so many African Americans who settled in Paris at the same time … at the absence of institutional racism. There was no segregation … no lynching. (There was) the possibility to sit at a cafe and be served by a white waiter, the possibility to talk to white people, to (have a) romance with white people,” Ndiaye said.
“It does not mean that racism did not exist in France. But French racism has often been more subtle, not as brutal as the American forms of racism,” he added.
Baker was among several prominent Black Americans, especially artists and writers, who found refuge in France after the two World Wars, including famed writer and intellectual James Baldwin.
They were “aware of the French empire and the brutalities of French colonization, for sure. But they were also having a better life overall than the one they had left behind in the United States,” Ndiaye, who also directs France’s state-run immigration museum, told The Associated Press.
Baker quickly became famous for her banana-skirt dance routines and wowed audiences at Paris theater halls. Her shows were controversial, Ndiaye stressed, because many activists believed she was “the propaganda for colonization, singing the song that the French wanted her to sing.”
Baker knew well about “the stereotypes that Black women had to face,” he said. “She also distanced herself from these stereotypes with her facial expressions.”
“But let’s not forget that when she arrived in France she was only 19, she was almost illiterate … She had to build her political and racial consciousness,” he said.
Baker became a French citizen after her marriage to industrialist Jean Lion in 1937. The same year, she settled in southwestern France, in the castle of Castelnaud-la-Chapelle.
“Josephine Baker can be considered to be the first Black superstar. She’s like the Rihanna of the 1920s,” said Rosemary Phillips, a Barbados-born performer and co-owner of Baker’s park in southwestern France.
Phillips said one of the ladies who grew up in the castle and met with Baker said: “Can you imagine a Black woman in the 1930s in a chauffeur-driven car — a white chauffeur — who turns up and says, ‘I’d like to buy the 1,000 acres here?’”
In 1938, Baker joined what is today called LICRA, a prominent antiracist league. The next year, she started to work for France’s counter-intelligence services against Nazis, notably collecting information from German officials who she met at parties. She then joined the French Resistance, using her performances as a cover for spying activities during World War II.
In 1944, Baker became second-lieutenant in a female group in the Air Force of the French Liberation Army of Gen. Charles De Gaulle.
After the war, she got involved in anti-racist politics and the civil rights struggle, both in France and in the United States.
Toward the end of her life, she ran into financial trouble, was evicted and lost her properties. She received support from Princess Grace of Monaco, who offered Baker a place for her and her children to live. Baker died in Paris in 1975 at age 68.
The ceremony bore all the hallmarks of French pomp: A military orchestra, the rousing national anthem, and a choir of children singing one of Baker’s own songs, according to the Elysee. The symbolic, tricolore-draped coffin was carried by six members of France’s air and space force, followed by another member of the Air Force carrying the five decorations that France bestowed upon Baker during her life. These include the World War II Resistance medal and the Knight of the Legion of Honor, one of the country’s highest awards.While she died in 1975, much has been made of the decision by Macron to grant her this honor now. For Macron, the occasion offers a chance to rally France around its pride of those who resisted the Nazi occupation in World War II, as well as address a long-standing deficit in the number of women, and people of color, who rest under the Pantheon dome.As Baker’s coffin was brought to the steps of the Pantheon, a recording of her most famous song was played: “J’ai deux amours” (I have two loves: My country and Paris).
Beauford Delaney (1901-1979) “Portraitist of the Famous”
“Perhaps I should say, flatly, what I believe–that he is a great painter, among the very greatest; but I do know that great art can only be created out of love, and that no greater lover has ever held a brush.”
James Baldwin (1924-1987), writer, friend of artist Beauford Delaney
Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim, c.1971oil on canvas
Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim, c.1971
Beauford Delaney, hailed as the most important African-American artists of the 20th century, whose life appeared to symbolize the mythical artistic existence of privation and relative obscurity, that show a retrospective of “uninhibited colorist (though never an unintelligent one)” that is “apotheosized” and whose talent and “free, open and outgoing nature” engendered admiration from everyone whom was fortunate enough to encounter him as he was THE darling of the international culture scene in New York and Paris. James Baldwin called him his “spiritual father.”
Remembering THE Greatest artists of the 20th century, the ‘amazing and invariable’ Beauford Delaney, the “Portraitist of the Famous”, who’s masterpieces are trumpeted as cutting-edge work in Black aesthetics, stylistic evolution from representation to pure abstraction, with new and radical theories with his techniques and expression of the politics of Black arts, affording him his very own, singular serious stature among abstract expressionists, transforming the critical landscape into a growing interest in his creation of “Black Abstraction”!
For more than a decade, Delaney showed compelling, vibrant images of energetic life: produced engaging abstract works, portraits, landscapes, and abstractions celebrated for their brilliance and technical complexity with his dramatic stylistic shift from figurative compositions of life to abstract expressionist studies of color and light, powerful works of art and culture, illuminate some of Delaney’s most innovative years and firmly place his work among the dominant art movements of the day.
The fascinating Beauford Delaney is a Modern artist who produced engaging portraits, landscapes, and abstractions celebrated for their brilliance and technical complexity with his dramatic stylistic shift from figurative compositions of New York life to abstract expressionist studies of color and light following his move to Paris in 1953, illuminate some of Delaney’s most innovative years and firmly place his work among the dominant art movements of the day!
The career of Beauford Delaney (1901-79) was mainly working with Expressionism, Harlem Renaissance who’s first exhibition was New Names In American Art: Recent Contributions To Painting And Sculpture By Negro Artists at The Renaissance Society in Chicago, IL in 1944, and the most recent exhibition was Art Basel Miami Beach 2020 – online viewing only at Art Basel Miami Beach in Miami Beach, FL in 2020. Beauford Delaney is mostly exhibited in United States, but also had exhibitions in Germany, United Kingdom and elsewhere. Delaney has 10 solo shows and 79 group shows over the last 76 years (for more information, see biography). Delaney has also been in 7 art fairs but in no biennials. The most important show was Beauford Delaney: From New York to Paris at Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, PA in 2005. Other important shows were at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minneapolis, MN and The Studio Museum in Harlem in New York City, NY. Beauford Delaney has been exhibited with Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden. Beauford Delaney’s art is in 9 museum collections, at France at the Museum of Modern Art , École des Beaux-Arts, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, NY and The Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL, featured in Jet and Playboy magazines among others.
Beauford Delaney is ranked among the Top 10 globally, and in United States. Delaney’s best rank was in 1944, the artist’s rank has improved over the last 5 years, with the most dramatic change in 1992.
Many of its prominent figures, who admiringly looked upon Delaney as their “Shaman” or “Yogi” and fondly referred to him as a “Black Buddha”, were described by his close friend, James Baldwin, as a “cross between Brer Rabbit and St. Francis of Assisi.”
His list of friends and acquaintances including artists, World Leaders, politicians, activist, authors/poets/writers, intellectuals, filmmakers, promoted by numerous patrons of the arts, world Cultural Ambassadors, art gallery owners, befriended by notable figures, and musicians Stuart Davis — his closest painter compatriot — W.E.B. Du Bois (whose portrait he painted), Salvadore Dalí (whose portrait he painted), Countee Cullen, Louis Armstrong (whose portrait he painted), Duke Ellington (whose portrait he painted), Ethel Waters (whose portraits he painted), W.C. Handy (whose portrait he painted), Henry Miller (who wrote a tribute to him), John F. Kennedy (whose portraits he painted), Robert Kennedy (whose portraits he painted), Jean-Claude Killy (whose portraits he painted), Herb Gentry, Alain Locke, Cy Twombly, Sterling Brown, Langston Hughes, Georgia O’Keeffe (who drew charcoal and pastel portraits of Delaney in 1943), Augusta Savage, Stuart Davis, John Marin, Pablo Picasso (whose portrait he painted), Richard A. Long (whose portrait he painted), John Koenig (whose portrait he painted), and Claude McKay were connected to Paris in various ways.
Also significant is the impact of jazz, as exemplified by the avante garde “free jazz” music explosion of Ornettte Coleman, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Frank Wright, Bobby Few, Bill Dixon, François Cotinaud, Sunny Murray, Barney Wilen, Globe Unity Orchestra, Andrew Hill, Dave Burrell, Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, Grachan Moncur III, Malachi Favors, Claude Delcloo, Beb Guérin, Kenneth Terroade, Bernard Vitet, Lester Bowie, Jerome Cooper, Joseph Jarman, Joachim Kühn, Steve Lacy, Roscoe Mitchell, Robin Kenyatta, Michel Portal, Irène Aebi, Ronnie Beer, Kent Carter, Dieter Gewissler, Oliver Johnson, Famoudou Don Moye, Alan Shorter, Bernard Vitet, Jouk Minor, Byard Lancaster, Kenneth Terroade, Paul Jeffrey, Ronnie Beer, Sonny Sharrock, Pharoah Sanders, Black Harold, Johnny Dyani, Gary Windo, Rene Augustus, Joseph Déjean, Beb Guérin, Claude Delcoo, Clifford Thornton, Wayne Shorter, Sun Ra and His Intergalactic Research Arkestra, François Tusques, Alan Silva and the Celestrial Communication Orchestra.
Luminaries Josephine Baker, Bob Blackburn, Ed Clark, Bob Thompson, Marian Anderson (whose portrait he painted), Jacob Lawrence, Ella Fitzgerald (whose portrait he painted), Zora Neale Hurston, Alfred Stieglitz, Carl Van Vechten, Edward Steichen, Dorothy Norman, Anaïs Nin, art studio owner Charles Alston, Jackson Pollock, Vassili Pikoula, Henri Chahine (whose portrait he painted), Charlie Parker (whose portrait and music he painted.), James Jones, Jean Genet, Lawrence Calcagno, Cab Calloway, Elaine DeKooning, Palmer C. Hayden (whose portrait he painted), art dealer Darthea Speyer (whose portrait he painted) who had exhibitions of Delaney’s art at Paris’ Galerie Lambert in 1964. Others include artists Charles Boggs, Al Hirschfeld, John Franklin Koenig, Harold Cousins, Herbert Gentry (whose portrait he painted), Ed Clark, and Ellis Wilson, authors James Jones and Henry Miller (who was also a water colorist), Writers Richard Wright, Surrealist poet Stanislas Rodanski, Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, William Gardner Smith, Richard Gibson, Lorraine Hansberry, Ted Joans, art historian Richard A. Long, and his friend Lynn Stone.
Delaney became close friends with another influential visual artist, Lawrence Calcagno. A white, abstract landscape artist from Northern California, it was an unlikely pairing when the two met in Paris. Yet the two men grew to share a close artistic bond, tied by their shared belief in the spiritual nature of painting and abstraction. They also became close personal friends, writing hundreds of letters to each other over Delaney’s later years, after Calcagno left Paris to return to America. In these letters, Delaney is at his most vulnerable and open, as he felt with a kindred spirit.
His closest lifelong friend, however, was James Baldwin — who, while fleeing a strict father at 16, looked up Delaney in the Village. He later called the artist his “principal witness.” Delaney was a kind of surrogate nurturing father to the writer. Judging by his 1941 Dark Rapture (James Baldwin), a steamy nude portrait of the 16-year-old writer (as well as from subsequent Baldwin portraits over the decades), Delaney seems to have been in love with the lithe young man 22 years his junior.
Indeed, while Delaney had not intended to settle permanently in Europe, he quickly realized he had found there a more hospitable climate in which to pursue his craft. Asked about his experience as an expatriate he replied, “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 1950s 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.”
While Paris had in some sense liberated Delaney, there were sorrows he could not escape. “There always seems to be the shadow,” Delaney wrote to a benefactor, “which follows the light.” Although he was referring to the financial difficulties that plagued him throughout his career, the artist could also have been talking about his struggles with mental illness, which manifested as psychotic breaks and ghostly voices in his head, resulting in his confinement to a mental hospital at the end of his life. While Delaney was a mentor to Baldwin during the author’s early years, Baldwin later became Delaney’s protector, assisting him financially and emotionally. For an introduction to an exhibition in Paris in 1964 Baldwin wrote, “Perhaps I am so struck by the light in Beauford’s paintings because he comes from darkness—as I do, as, in fact, we all do.” The vibrant luminosity of Composition 16 is but one example of Delaney’s lifelong quest to find light in that darkness.
Many felt him to be the “Dean of African American Artists Living in Europe.” Although he never fully wanted this distinction most of Delaney’s works were close to being classified as abstract art. Beauford Delaney died in Paris at age 78 on March 26, 1979.
Delaney lived and worked in Paris for many years and much of his work was neglected until a retrospective in 1978 at the Studio Museum in Harlem. During his absence, the French government, in an effort to collect delinquent accounts, sealed off his apartment and prepared to auction off his products of nearly a forty year career. Many of his works were stolen and some had to be recovered by European Intelligence, the CIA/FBI. Had the works been sold, dispersed throughout Europe, the neglect may have been irreversible.
The painter Beauford Delaney (Knoxville 1901-1979 Paris) was lost to history for a time. Yet in the mid-twentieth century, Delaney was considered an important artist of his generation.
Following his death, he was praised as a great and neglected painter but, with a few notable exceptions, the neglect continued.
A retrospective of his work at the Studio Museum in Harlem a year before his death did little to revive interest in his work. It was not until the 1988 exhibition Beauford Delaney: From Tennessee to Paris, curated by the French art dealer Philippe Briet at the Philippe Briet Gallery, that Delaney’s work was again exhibited in New York, followed by two retrospectives in the gallery: “Beauford Delaney: A Retrospective [50 Years of Light]” in 1991, and “Beauford Delaney: The New York Years [1929–1953]” in 1994.
Delaney disappeared from collective memory partly due to the racial bias of art history, which, among other things, meant that even while he was celebrated, it was less as a painter equal to his contemporaries than as some kind of Negro seer or spiritual black Buddha wherein he could not escape the long American night of racism.
“Whatever Happened to Beauford Delaney?”, an article by Eleanor Heartney, appeared in Art in America in response to the 1994 exhibition asking why this once well regarded “artist’s artist” was now virtually unknown to the American art public. “What happened? Is this another case of an over-inflated reputation returning to its true level? Or was Delaney undone by changing fashions which rendered his work unpalatable to succeeding generations? Why did Beauford Delaney so completely disappear from American art history?” The author believed that Delaney’s disappearance from the consciousness of the New York art world was linked to “his move to Paris at a crucial moment in the consolidation of New York’s position as the world’s cultural capital and his work’s irrelevance to the history of American art as it was being written by critics” at the time. The article concludes, “Today [1994] as those histories unravel and are replaced by narratives with a more varied and colorful weave, artists like Delaney can be seen in a new light.”
In 1985 James Baldwin described the impact of Delaney on his life, saying he was “the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist. In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognized as my Master and I as his Pupil. He became, for me, an example of courage and integrity, humility and passion. An absolute integrity: I saw him shaken many times and I lived to see him broken but I never saw him bow.” Baldwin marveled over Delaney’s ability to emulate such light in his work despite the darkness he was surrounded by for the majority of his life. It is this insight of Delaney’s past, Baldwin believes, that serves as evidence for the true victory Delaney secured. Baldwin admired his keen ability to “lead the inner and the outer eye, directly and inexorably, to a new confrontation with reality.” He further wrote, “Perhaps I should not say, flatly, what I believe – that he is a great painter – among the very greatest; but I do know that great art can only be created out of love, and that no greater lover has ever held a brush.”
His work is sold in galleries for increasingly high prices, and his paintings hang prominently among modernist and postwar works in New York’s Museum of Modern Art [where his yellow Composition 16 (1954-56) was hung next to a work by Mark Rothko], the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery (notably a portrait of Baldwin). The American artist Glenn Ligon curated a 2015 exhibition at the Tate Liverpool titled “Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions” that featured two works by Delaney (one a portrait of Baldwin) and put Delaney in the company of the Abstract Expressionists, next to a picture by Franz Kline.
Because his estate has been largely closed to scholars to the present day, and because his reputation waned after his death, critical writing about Delaney is almost nonexistent, even with the flourishing of Baldwin studies across disciplines.
The Studio Museum of Harlem broke ground with the first major posthumous exhibition of Delaney on US soil with Beauford Delaney: A Retrospective (1979) and included the full text of Baldwin’s previously published essay “Introduction to Exhibition of Beauford Delaney Opening December 4, 1964 at the Gallery Lambert.” There have been other exhibitions of Delaney’s work since 2000 that include Baldwin in minor ways and whose catalogues have provided most of the critical work done recently on Delaney to date: these include Beauford Delaney: Liquid Light: Paris Abstractions 1954-1970, organized by Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in 1999; Beauford Delaney’ at the Sert Gallery of the Harvard University Art Museums; An Artistic Friendship: Beauford Delaney and Lawrence Calcagno at the Palmer Museum of Art at the Pennsylvania State University in 2001; The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow, organized by the High Museum of Art in 2002 and curated by Richard J. Powell, who contributed a groundbreaking essay about Delaney’s use of color; Beauford Delaney: New York to Paris (2005), organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, whose robust catalog features several scholarly essays mentioning James Baldwin; Beauford Delaney: Renaissance of Form and Vibration of Color (2016) at Montparnasse’s Reid Hall and sponsored by Wells International Foundation and Les Amis de Beauford Delaney, along with Columbia Global Centers/Reid Hall Exposition; and Gathering Light: Works by Beauford Delaney (2017) at the Knoxville Museum of Art in Tennessee. Aside from the catalogue essays from these and other exhibitions, the only monograph devoted to Delaney is the 1998 biography by David Leeming, Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney (1998). Leeming outlines the broad arc of Delaney’s life and artistic development while emphasizing the contrast between the artist’s vibrant social life and troubled inner life that led to his institutionalization in the late 1970s. It is encouraging to see, however, that references to Delaney are now appearing in cutting-edge work on Black aesthetics, such as Fred Moten’s theoretical work, and in reconstructions of LGBTQIA arts.
While previous Delaney exhibitions and publications have almost exclusively emphasized Delaney’s stylistic evolution from the 1940s to the 1960s, from representation to pure abstraction, as a function of his move from New York to Paris and/or his worsening mental health, the proposed symposium will put Delany into conversation with new and radical theories about the techniques and politics of Black arts, affording him some of the first serious treatment by academic criticism to date. Because of Delaney’s stature among abstract expressionists, the project will contribute to a growing interest in the past ten years concerning “Black Abstraction” in the arts, as evidence by shows at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery (2014), the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (2014), Pace Gallery (2016), Anita Shapolsky Gallery and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. (2018). It is time to bring Delaney also into the sphere of queer theory, new Black aesthetics, and new theories of Black care that are transforming the critical landscape in academe and in which Baldwin is now frequently found.
But his life ended very much like it began. Even after the fame and notoriety, he was still a poor, black man with many struggles. Just like his art, Delaney’s life was filled with light and darkness. Highs and lows.
If you were to picture a counter-image to help balance that perception in one person, you could hardly do better than Beauford Delaney. He was black, he was gay, he was unpredictable, he was charismatic. He was an intellectual, and he was an artist, in fact a wildly colorful, creative and unpredictable abstract expressionist. He was cosmopolitan, connected to the world beyond, and adored in Paris and New York, where his paintings, some of them famous and very expensive, have been exhibited, even recently.
Illustrated in black-and-white in a photograph with the artist in his studio, n.p.
Beauford Delaney: A Retrospective, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, April 9 – July 2, 1978;
Museum of National Center for Afro-American Artists, Dorchester, MA, October 8 – November 4, 1978
Illustrated in black-and-white in a photograph with the artist in his studio and listed on the checklist as no. 13, n.p. (titled Portrait of a Man)
NOTE
Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim (c.1971) exemplifies Beauford Delaney’s masterful portraits in which he uses bold, contrasting color to express an arresting psychological and emotional likeness. With his signature yellow palette and expressive brushstroke, Delaney portrays his friend Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim.
Throughout his career, Beauford Delaney executed modernist and psychologically compelling portraits of friends, acquaintances and patrons. Portraits of those he knew intimately, tended to be the most compelling and profound. Generally, Delaney’s portrait paintings tend to be modernist, melding representation with abstraction, sharing a strong affinity with the gestural luminous abstractions that dominated Delaney’s oeuvre after 1953. Even after Delaney evolved into an abstract expressionist painter upon his move to France in September 1953, he continued to paint portraits that were much more than straightforward depictions of his sitters. While the composition was defined by the subject, he executed modernist canvases defined by his relatively monochromatic fields of color and distinctive brushwork. Like Delaney’s landscapes, cityscapes and interiors of his Greene Street period of the 1940s and early 1950s, the faces, bodies and backgrounds of his portraits were vehicles for his personal language of abstraction. Art historian Richard J. Powell writes:
“In addition to his artistic commitment to abstraction, experimenting with painted surfaces in oil pigments, and delving into the visual effects and relational possibilities of color, Beauford Delaney was equally bound to an art of portraiture. The genre that first brought Delaney critical notice and a measure of success, portraiture exemplified his genuine love of people – all kinds of people – and his fascination with their outward appearances, personalities, minds, and auras. As seen in almost every early photograph of Delaney – whether in his crowded Greene Street studio or sitting alongside his work at the Annual Washington Square Art Fair – portraits largely defined his as an artist. Yet…portraiture was also a vehicle for sorting out an array of primarily visual issues: concerns of color and form that could easily be coupled with his painting a friend’s likeness or an esteemed individual’s spirit.”*2
Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim recalls meeting Beauford Delaney and sitting for his portrait in Paris in 1971, when al-Hakim was around twenty years old. al-Hakim was born Randy Wallace before converting to Islam and changing his name.
Beauford Delaney and Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim with Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim (c.1971), Jean Genet with Jean Genet in the upper right and Bobby Kennedy a little lower behind my left shoulder. Above Portrait is his “Little Totem of Light”, ca. 1966
Beauford Delaney and Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim with Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim (c.1971), 1971
Curator Patricia Sue Canterbury writes of Delaney’s portraits of the 1960s:
“Delaney’s portraiture during the 1960s, although often regarded as a departure from the artist’s abstract explorations of light, was actually an extension of the same. As he had reassured viewers at the opening of his solo show at the Galerie Lambert in late 1964, abstraction and portraiture ‘were studies in light revealed – the light that have meaning to the individuals depicted…and the light considered directly as contained…in the abstract paintings.’ As the decade progressed, however, it is clear that any boundaries perceived between the two became increasingly blurred. Solid forms within the portraits dematerialized and the subject and the enveloping atmosphere seemingly shared the same atomic structure.”*2
Powell writes of Delaney’s use of a yellow palette:
“Delaney’s artistic preoccupation with the color yellow is governed by its capacity to illuminate a world in which poverty, inhumanity, lovelessness, mediocrity, and darkness threaten his soul and being. No stranger to assaults on the body and psyche, Delaney sought in his work and throughout his entire life to experience that state of perfect bliss in nature and society, to reach that nearly unattainable note or apogee of emotional discernment in the arts, and to know that ecstatic feeling of an ‘excessive and deliberate joy’ in life. Oddly enough, by placing himself and his audience in his dense and luxurious yellow zone, he realized these grand ambitions.”*3
Beauford Delaney in his studio and Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim (c.1971) can be seen above Delaney
Photograph of Beauford Delaney in his studio as reproduced in the catalogue for the exhibition Beauford Delaney, Galerie Darthea Speyer, Paris, France, February 6 – March 2, 1973; Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim (c.1971) can be seen above Delaney to the right
Portraits by Beauford Delaney are in numerous museum collections including:
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL;
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA;
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA;
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI;
Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, TN;
Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, NY;
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY;
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY;
The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC;
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA;
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA;
SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA;
The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY;
Tennessee State Museum, Nashville, TN;
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA;
Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC;
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY;
Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA.
Footnotes:
*1-Richard J. Powell, “The Color of Ecstasy,” Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow (Atlanta: The High Museum of Art, 2002), 20-21
*2-Patricia Sue Canterbury, “Transatlantic Transformations: Beauford Delaney in Paris,” Beauford Delaney: From New York To Paris exh. cat. (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2004), 65
“In another religion they honor people who serve like you with Sainthood!” – Economics Professor Adeel Malik,Oxford University, England and World Renowned News Expert Commentator, speaking about Abdul-Jalil and the Aaron & Margaret Wallace Foundation.
“GOD sent me an ANGEL!” – Hammer, speaking about Abdul-Jalil.
“Jalil, YOU ARE A TZADIK (SAINT)!”– Barry Barkan, Live Oak Institute and
Ashoka Fellow at Ashoka Foundation:Innovators for the Public
“I thank God for you and for bringing you into my life and for the ministry you have been given to help the people of God!”– Pastor L. J. Jennings, Kingdom Builders Christian Fellowship, speaking about Abdul-Jalil and AMWF
Jalil with 1 of his Rolls Royces
Beauford Delaney’s Abdul-Jalil al-Hakim, c.1971Beauford Delaney, Self-portrait, 1944
Beauford Delaney, Self-portrait, 1944. Photo: Estate of Beauford Delaney by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire, Court Appointed Administrator; Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, NY
Beauford Delaney was an American Harlem Renaissance painter known for his colorful Modernist compositions and distinctive approach to figuration. One of the most important African-American artists of the early 20th century, he often painted New York street scenes, lively scenes in jazz clubs, and portraits of prominent black figures like James Baldwin and W.E.B. Du Bois. Can Fire in the Park (1946) is one of his most iconic images, movingly capturing a common occurrence in Depression-era New York life. In addition to his representational work, Delaney also painted abstractly, noting that “the abstraction, ostensibly, is simply for me the penetration of something that is more profound in many ways than the rigidity of a form,” he explained. “A form if it breaths some, if it has some enigma to it, it is also the enigma that is the abstract, I would think.” Born on December 30, 1901 in Knoxville, TN as one of 10 children, he worked as sign-post painter as a teenager before going on to study in Boston at the Massachusetts Normal School, the South Boston School of Art, and the Copley Society. After school, he moved to Harlem in New York, where he befriended fellow artists like Alfred Stieglitz, Stuart Davis, who introduced him to the work of Modernists like Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and others. He moved to Europe in 1953 but was unable to find the same success he had previously had in New York, and gradually succumbed to alcoholism and mental health problems before his death on March 26, 1979 in Paris, France. Today, Delaney’s works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. Fame, at least lasting fame — the your-work-goes-down-in-history kind, often accompanied by fat royalty payments — is a club that thinks of itself as an unbiased meritocracy, blind to everything but aesthetic innovation and popular success. It’s never quite worked out that way. When we look at the past, we still see generations of great talents who never quite got their due critically or commercially, many of them left relatively unsung. In this ongoing series, our critics pick artists they feel remain underappreciated and tell their stories and sing their praises. “He is amazing … this Beauford,” the novelist Henry Miller wrote of his lifelong friend Beauford Delaney in a 1945 essay that helped make the painter (whom Miller called a “black monarch” capable of making “the great white world … grow smaller”) a legendary attraction in Greenwich Village. So much so that people often gathered outside Delaney’s building at 181 Greene Street, where he lived and worked on the top floor — a walk-up lit only by a wood-burning potbellied stove. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1901, Delaney migrated north to Boston in 1923 to study art, then moved to New York in November 1929, days after the onset of the Great Depression. That first day in New York, he slept on a Union Square bench, where someone stole his shoes. The next morning, he set out on foot, in newly bought shoes, to walk uptown to Harlem. When he reached Central Park, he stopped because of his severely blistered feet.
Abdul-Jalil Portrait by Beauford Delaney, in 1971. Portrait of Jean Genet in backgroud, top right, Kennedy right behind Jalil
Things had never been tougher for American artists — let alone black ones. Art schools didn’t take black artists, and independent-studio classes banned black artists from figure-drawing sessions with white models. Undaunted, Delaney began drawing at a midtown dance studio. Somehow, his career took off almost overnight. Four months after he arrived in New York, an article appeared in the New York Telegraph about portraits Delaney had done of dancers and society figures.
Portrait de Jean Genet, Beauford Delaney, 1972 Beauford Delaney was a painter, specializing in portraits. The Beauford Delaney collection consists of correspondence with colleagues, friends, gallery owners, and family members, as well as printed material documenting Delaney’s life in Paris.
BIOGRAPHICAL/HISTORICAL INFORMATION
Beauford Delaney was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, the third child of the Reverend Samuel Delaney and Delia Johnson Delaney. He attended the Knoxville Colored School and later studied art with an elderly Knoxville artist, who encouraged him to get further training. In 1924 Delaney went to Boston where he studied at the Massachusetts Normal School and the South Boston School of Art, and attended evening classes at the Copley Society.
Delaney went to New York in 1929, settling at first in Harlem. He painted society women and professional dancers at Billy Pierce’s dancing school on West 46th Street, which gained him a reputation as a portraitist. His first one-man show, which consisted of five pastels and ten charcoal drawings, was at the 135th Street Branch Library of the New York Public Library in 1930. During the same year three of his portraits were included in a group show at the Whitney Studio Galleries, the predecessor of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Delaney also taught part-time at a progressive school in Greenwich Village.
By the late 1940s Beauford Delaney had become a significant figure on the art scene. He illustrated “Unsung Americans Sung” (1944), a book of black musical tributes edited by W.C. Handy; he had a series of one-man shows in New York and Washington, D.C.; and he exhibited in group shows in a number of other cities. In 1945 he showed his first series of portraits of writers Henry Miller and James Baldwin, who would become his lifelong friends. In 1949 he began an association with the Roko Gallery in New York, where he exhibited annually until 1953.
In 1953 Delaney left New York with the intention of settling in Rome, but a visit to Paris turned into a permanent stay. He had two studios in Paris, the first in the suburbs of Clamart and the other in the Rue Vincingetorix. In Paris Delaney exhibited in one-man and group shows at the Gallerie Paul Fachetti (1960), the Centre Culturel Americain (1961 and 1972), the Galerie Lambert (1964), the Musee Galliera (1967) and the Galerie Darthea Speyer (1973), among other places. The latter was a major showing of a selection of his work from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s and the catalog contained tributes by James Jones, James Baldwin, and Georgia O’Keefe. Delaney also exhibited in England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the United States. The Paris years saw the creation of several masterpieces including portraits of singer Marian Anderson and writer Jean Genet. During this period he also created a series of interiors and studies in watercolor.
After suffering two nervous breakdowns, Delaney was institutionalized, and died on March 26, 1979 at St. Ann’s Hospital in Paris. Delaney’s last one-man show in the United States was at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1978, inaugurating that museum’s Black Masters Series. Delaney’s work is in several private collections and in the collections of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Newark Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
SCOPE AND ARRANGEMENT
The Beauford Delaney collection consists of correspondence with colleagues, friends, gallery owners, and family members, as well a printed material documenting Delaney’s life in Paris. Biographical information is provided in statements Delaney authored, articles prepared by others for catalogs, and his obituary. Among the many friends, colleagues and art collectors with whom he maintained an active correspondence is James Baldwin, who wrote an introduction to a catalog for an exhibition of Delaney’s art at Paris’ Galerie Lambert in 1964. Other correspondents include artists Charles Boggs, Al Hirschfeld, John Franklin Koenig, and Ellis Wilson, authors James Jones and Henry Miller (who was also a water colorist), art historian Richard A. Long, and his friend Lynn Stone. Additional artists, painters, writers, gallery owners and musicians who corresponded with Delaney include Lawrence Calcagno, Cab Calloway, Elaine DeKooning, Palmer C. Hayden, and Darthea Speyer.
The letters discuss the style of painting of the correspondents, travels, purchase and exhibition of works, and personal matters. Numerous gallery announcements for art exhibits of Delaney’s and other artists’ works in Paris, New York and other cities demonstrate the extent of Delaney’s activities in the contemporary art world. The collection also contains a large number of picture postcards, some sent by friends, and gallery announcements. Family letters are from his brother and fellow artist, Joseph Delaney, and discuss his own work and impressions of Paris; his brother Emery (includes letters Delaney wrote to his brother, in addition to those received); and Delaney’s niece, Imogene.
Beauford Delaney
Jazz Banb 1963
Sale Date: December 13, 2019
Auction Closed
SOURCE OF ACQUISITION
Donated by Daniel Richard in 1988.
PROCESSING INFORMATION
Compiled by Victor N. Smythe, 1998. Finding aid edited and adapted to digital form by Kay Menick in 2016.
Paintings and art catalogs transferred to Art and Artifact Division. Photographs transferred to Photographs and Prints Division.
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