Beauford DELANEY

This large sheet was drawn on the island of Majorca in August 1961, shortly after a trip to Greece when Delaney suffered a severe mental breakdown, believing that a mob was trying to kill him, and had attempted suicide. Accompanied by some friends from Paris - Charley Boggs, a painter from West Virginia, and his wife Gita, their young son Gordon, and Joe and Bernice O’Reilly - the artist had gone to the coastal village of San Telmo in Majorca to try and recover his health. His mental state remained very poor, however, and he continued to hear voices that led him to believe that criminals had followed him from Greece and were intent on doing him harm. Nevertheless, as Delaney’s biographer David Leeming notes, ‘In San Telmo he did eat well and rest, and, with the help of soothing talks with Bernice and Gita especially, managed to maintain a surface calm and even began to do some watercolors.’ As the artist himself wrote in a letter from San Telmo to a friend, ‘Being here has calmed me much. Eat well and make watercolors and feel my old self.’ 

Leeming has written that ‘There is one brief period in his life during which Beauford’s paintings do seem to be a direct representation of his psychological problems. On his way to Greece in 1961, Beauford attempted suicide. After his return to Paris, he went with friends to Majorca in search of restoration, and later in 1962, he spent time in a mental hospital. During these months, Beauford did several works in watercolor and gouache on paper. He spoke of these works, executed quickly with wide brush strokes, as his “Rorschach tests”, and some of them were, in fact, done at his doctor’s suggestion…After his release from hospital and removal to the Rue Vercingétorix, Beauford wrote to his old friend Henry Miller that the “birth pains” associated with his passage from sickness to “enlightenment” were “almost unbearable…yet morning comes after the darkest night.”…The watercolor and gouache paintings on paper of the early sixties are liquid in feeling – green and blue pools serving as breeding sources for Beauford’s motion-filled and all-pervasive yellow light.’ Only a handful of works by Delaney done during his brief stay in Majorca are known.