Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney (Hardcover)

~ David Leeming (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazing Grace is an intimate portrait of African American artist Beauford Delaney (1901-79). Author David Leeming, who knew Delaney, limns the complex inner life that informed his paintings--notable for psychological depth and vibrant colors--but also fueled his alcoholism and mental illness. A gentle, charming man, Delaney maintained close friendships with writers as diverse as Henry Miller and James Baldwin, yet often felt lonely and underappreciated as an artist on his life's journey from Tennessee to New York City to Paris. Leeming tells this culturally and personally poignant story with sensitive grace.

From Publishers Weekly

Leeming's admiration for Beauford Delaney (1901-1979), a brilliant but largely overlooked African American modernist painter, shines through every page of this intimate and engrossing biography. Despite constant struggles with poverty, loneliness, alcoholism and mental illness, Delaney emerges as an inspiring figure?a poor minister's son from Knoxville, Tenn. who turned to art as an outlet for intense emotions. James Baldwin called Delaney his "spiritual father," and Leeming, Baldwin's authorized biographer, says that this is in a sense a continuation of his Baldwin biography released in 1994. Culling material from Delaney's journal/sketchbooks, letters, and interviews with Delaney, his family and friends, Leeming peels away the layers of Delaney's considerable charm to reveal his divided life, which ended tragically in a Paris mental hospital. Though on the surface, Delaney "was all tranquillity and wisdom," he spent his life navigating separate worlds: black artists and intellectuals who knew nothing about his homosexuality; white, gay bohemians, homeless stragglers whom he invited home day and night; and the cultural elite of Boston, New York and Paris from the 1920s through the 1970s. Although enlivened throughout with vivid anecdotes by and about such friends as Henry Miller, Al Hirschfeld, Countee Cullen, Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe, Leeming's biography falls short of bringing the subject himself to life, perhaps because of Delaney's inherent elusiveness. Still, Leeming manages to offer some astute psychological insights, and the historical context he provides adds an important dimension. Photos.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; 1ST edition (February 19, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019509784X
• ISBN-13: 978-0195097849
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #964,983 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars SAVED BY GRACE?, July 8, 2000

By	Bonita L. Davis (Decatur, Georgia) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

America's artistic milieu is known for dismissing from its memory those artists whose works and lives are deemed trivial and not worthy of consideration. Such an attitude has denied younger generations of artists the experience of knowing some of the great artistic man and women of our time. Beauford Delaney was one of those artists relegated to the halls of obscurity.

Amazing Grace is David Leemings biographical piece that examines Delaney's life and contributions to the art world. He looks at the forces which brought forth America's premiere modernist artist and shows how his gift impacted on the way one views life and art.

Who is this man, Delaney? A superficial view of his life reveals him as an impoverished homosexual Black artist who is plagued by many demons as he struggles to find himself as an artist and at peace with his sexuality. James Baldwin called him his spiritual father who was a cross between Brer Rabbit and St. Francis of Asissi. Others knew him as the good negro or an eccentric gadfly. Whatever one may call him, Delaney's goal was to infuse the concept of love within his work that would bring him the wholeness that he failed to capture in his life.

Plagued by paranoia, alcoholism and guilt over his homosexuality, Delaney failed to achieve intimacy in his relationships but poured out his inner struggle through his art. Like many artists, he went through several stages of development in his career which reached its climax in France. Unfortunately the demon of paranoia stripped him of his artistic ability in his later years.

This book must be read to get a handle on the artistic struggles of African Americans and how they succeeded inspite of their alienation from the mainstream art world. Delaney also struggled with being homosexual which undoubtably alienated him from his family and Black colleagues. His struggle opens up a new chapter in examining how sexuality impacts on a minority artists life. Delaney was saved from obscurity through this view of his life. Whether he was saved by grace is a moot point for his demonic voices did him in.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Reviewed in Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, February 13, 1999

By A Customer

James E. Coleman, Jr., writing in the Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1999 notes: "Whether Leeming is as successful in taking on an artist's life as he had been with the literary life of [James] Baldwin, I am not certain. His knowledge of Baldwin's literary world is not quite matched by his savvy of the art world of the same period. Nevertheless, we have a fine introduction to an artist whose reputation is growing and who lived a fascinating life." That's high praise coming from Coleman, editor of The Encyclopedia Homophilica.