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Christian Weaver
Dr. Budzynski
ARTH 340-01
25 January 2022
Beauford Delaney: Making Up Space
After the devastation of World War II, there was a distinctive shift towards abstraction in
art the world over. More specifically, American artists like Jackson Pollock, William
DeKooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko captured the post-war American spirit through the
abstract expressionist movement. Their ability to exemplify the essence of infinite freedom
through color fields and action painting, served as a redefinition of global understandings of
space, time, and the collective unconscious. At the height of their careers, another little known
American abstract expressionist painter named Beauford Delaney was in Paris making his own
masterpieces.
A poor, Black, gay, mentally ill, and middle-aged man, Delaney’s works captured the
little-considered lives of marginalized groups in a post-World-War American society. These
respective personal identities could be part of the reason why his paintings were not treated with
the same regard as his contemporaries, as the space he inhabited was one that existed in
opposition to the more palatable space of absolute freedom––where the more privileged of his
peers dwelled. This marked divide is captured most expertly within his 1968 Portrait of Ella
Fitzgerald (Figure 1).
Standing at just 24 x 19.5 in, this work differs from the larger scale works traditionally
associated with abstract expressionism. Within a swirling golden sea of color and texture, lie the
basic facial landmarks of an abstracted Ella Fitzgerald. Her form emerges from and disappears
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into this color field, perceivably in simulation. She appears to exist between and within the
twinkling blue, green, red, orange, and white marks. There is no discernable setting in the
background. In fact, there is no real distinction of fore, middle, or background. Her visage and
the silhouetted light form––that can only be presumed to be her upper torso––seem to lie upon
the same plane as the fuzzy light show that surrounds her––and yet, there is an intricate sense of
infinite depth to the piece as a whole.
As the viewer finds themselves entranced by Ella’s gaze, they may also find that she is ––
and is not–– the space that surrounds her. Her figure seems almost as if it is moving forward and
away from the viewer, creating a sense of uncanny and leading the viewer to question if this is a
figure purposely placed on the picture plane or a product of the mind’s inherent tendency to
connect recognizable patterns in unrecognizable circumstances. 1 As Ella floats in space, it
becomes apparent that she is timeless––she has no detectable markings of age and exhibits no
indication of the time in which she is existing––she is not adorned with any garments or hairstyle
that could indicate her location in time nor does she project a signature of any distinct moment.
This idea is then further perpetuated by the whimsical twirling movement of the color field from
which she is emerging. She appears to be between realms, otherworldly, in a space unknown or
perhaps underexplored.
The depth of the piece appears infinite, with no real ending or beginning points
for the eye to trace. The space represented here is the space Delaney is inhabiting on the fringes
of the fringes of society––between two worlds of Black and white, home and a home away,
acceptance and rejection. Where the others simply existed in the rough and tumble, highly
machismo world of American abstract expressionism, Delaney’s work highlights the overlooked
1.
Claudette Lauzon, “An Unhomely Geneology of Contemporary Art,” in The Unmaking of Home in Contemporary
Art, (University of Toronto Press, 2017) 30.
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hazards of American men taking up and abstracting so much space as if it were their sole
possession. As their art demonstrates American prowess to the rest of the world, it consumes the
spaces of those less marketable existences––forcing the creation of new, less defined, less
comfortable spaces. A household name like Ella Fitzgerald fades and recedes into uncharted
space where light is neither friend nor foe and there exists no reconciliation between the world’s
understanding of American life and its reality.
Just as Claudette Lauzon speaks to the “…media and consumer society that increasingly
voids temporality and collapses space,” Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald acts as an open-ended,
pseudo-conclusion to that phenomenon. 2 Falling in line with this aestheticization of trauma, the
piece invites the viewer into a space imagined where space does not exist and a time where the
resource has been continually robbed from its imaginer. Is this freedom or is this a representation
of the prison that is the in-betweenness of being other-ed?
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Lauzon, “An Unhomely Geneology,” 27.
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Figure 1: Beauford Delaney. Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald, 1968. 24 x 19.5 in., oil on canvas, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA
(scadmoa.org/).
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Bibliography
Lauzon, Claudette. “An Unhomely Genealogy of Contemporary Art.” In The Unmaking of Home in
Contemporary Art, 26–68. University of Toronto Press, 2017.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3138/j.ctt1whm8v6.6.
