Beauford Delaney

Beauford Delaney (1901–1979) was an American modernist painter. He is remembered for his work associated with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as for his later development of an abstract expressionist style following his move to Paris in the 1950s.

Delaney studied art in Boston in the 1920s before moving to New York in 1929, where he became part of the Harlem Renaissance artistic milieu. His early work combined elements of modernism with figurative and expressive approaches, gradually evolving toward greater abstraction over time. 

After relocating to Paris in 1953, Delaney became part of the international artistic community and remained in France for the rest of his life. He was closely connected with Joan Mitchell and other American expatriate artists, and emerged as a central figure within an African American artistic circle in Paris, which included Herbert Gentry, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and a broader generation of artists who arrived after 1945, among them Ed Clark, Harold Cousins, and Larry Potter.