STARS IN BLACK TURTLENECKS
JAMES BALDWIN. PORTRAIT BY BEAUFORD DELANEY. 1963. FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY. WASHINGTON, D.C.
I have always thought yellow was a great color for African American women. Even though Baldwin could be a bit of a dandy - and daringly, archly sissy when he chose - I just can’t imagine him wearing a yellow turtleneck. He was to my mind, a mind he has helped shape with his work and his life, just more of a black turtleneck kind of guy - especially when he was hanging out in Greenwich Village with Lorraine Hansberry and his mentor, artist Beauford Delaney, whom he met in Delaney’s Village doorway when Baldwin, then a troubled 15-year-old boy wise beyond his years but filled with a yearning to which he felt yoked, had arrived at the urging of mutual friends to hear Beauford sing and maybe get cheered up and be the recipient of advice but discovered more deeply that day his lifelong mentor who inspired him to be his truest, unyoked self: an African American gay man whose very existence - not just his art - was a radical act. Delaney’s circle also included Louis Armstrong and Georgia O’Keefe, but it was Baldwin who was his kindred spirit. Beauford’s move to Paris and Baldwin’s witnessing how it freed him artistically to match the other ways freedom was registering for him was what beckoned an emboldened Baldwin himself there. “Beauford was the first living proof, to me, that a black man could be an artist,” wrote Baldwin in his essay “The Pride of the Ticket.” “In a warmer time, a less blasphemous place, he would have been recognized as my teacher 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.”
I’d like to think - I do think - the black lines so deeply delineating the turtleneck in this portrait of Baldwin by Delaney denote its blackness in regards to the high tones of all the yellows in the painting, which could be a visual pun perhaps about Baldwin not belonging to that caste of characters in their shared world, or maybe it could be a signal of Baldwin’s own deep, black lineage which delineated his work, his voice rather high-toned at times but never condescending. His lyricism was incendiary - unlike Capote, that other literary sissy of his era, who lobbed sentences at society and whose whiteness crippled him in some way into not questioning his status at being a rather rarified part of society’s amusing little mascot as it fetishized him so he could fit into their circle and adorn it as an ornament. Baldwin went deeper than Capote in his work; he fetishized himself. Capote saw himself in the reflected light of others. Baldwin - inspired by Delaney - found himself reflected in the cruel world’s wondrous light, wanton yet willful, its beauty the first emboldened move by the force that made it as it surrendered to itself and its own power. Baldwin wrote about such light in his introduction to an exhibition of Delaney’s work at the Gallery Lambert in 1964:
BALDWIN AND DELANEY - YES, IN A BLACK TURTLENECK - WALKING THE STREETS OF PARIS. CIRCA 1960. ESTATE OF BEAUFORD DELANEY
SOME JOY
BALDWIN AND DELANEY AT THE AMERICAN CULTURAL CENTER IN THE 1970s
BEFORE GOOGLE
“DARK RAPTURE.” PORTRAIT OF JAMES BALDWIN AT THE AGE OF 19 BY BEAUFORD DELANEY. 1943. ESTATE OF BEAUFORD DELANEY