The Cleveland Museum of Art Acquires Major Beauford Delaney Abstract Painting

As Special Advisor and Representative of the Estate of Beauford Delaney (1901–1979), Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is proud to announce the acquisition of Untitled (c.1958) by The Cleveland Museum of Art—the first major Delaney painting to enter the museum’s permanent collection. Described by the museum as “one of Beauford Delaney’s finest and most exuberant achievements,” the work will hang in its East Wing among other masterpieces of abstract expressionism by Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Lee Krasner, Norman Lewis, Morris Louis, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

Untitled is a particularly large painting from Delaney’s body of abstract compositions, which became his primary output after moving from Greenwich Village to the Paris suburb of Clamart in the early 1950s. There he felt a newfound sense of freedom and embraced the gestural language of non-objective abstraction of which Untitled is a standout example. This painting is also notable for its predominately yellow palette, as the hue holds illuminating connotations of a sacred, enrapturing light in the context of his oeuvre. The variegated, densely layered underpainting augments the radiant effect of the yellow pigments, which have been applied in the artist's lyrically expressive brushstrokes; here, Delaney depicts light and color as ecstatic matter.

In addition to an illustrious provenance—the work was in the personal collection of Delaney's Paris gallerist Paul Facchetti for many years—Untitled has been included in multiple important traveling exhibitions including Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow at the High Museum in Atlanta (2002–03), curated by Richard J. Powell, Blues for Smoke at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012–13), curated by Bennett Simpson, and Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC (2020–21), curated by Adrienne L. Childs.

Learn more about Beauford Delaney