BEAUFORD DELANEY (1901-1979)

“Delaney’s career-long decision to enshrine himself, loved ones, and the art of painting itself in a succession of radiant, joyous, magnificent, and painfully alive shades of yellow attest to his work’s greater, post-Abstract Expressionist mission. … [He] sought in his work and throughout his entire life to experience that state of perfect bliss in nature and society, to reach that nearly unattainable note or apogée of emotional discernment in the arts, and to know that ecstatic feeling of ‘excessive and deliberate joy’ in life.”
– R. J. Powell, Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow, exh. cat., Atlanta, High Museum of Art, 2002.