Amy J. Elias is Chancellor’s Professor and Director of the Denbo Center for Humanities and the Arts at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is the author of
In this chapter, Rachel Cohen examines four paintings by Beauford Delaney—Self-Portrait (1944), Untitled (Village Street) (1948), Self Portrait (1962), and The Black Sage (1967)—to consider the relationships between “I’s” and “eyes,” between city streets and self-regard, and among the genres of landscape, portrait, and self-portrait. Drawing insights from Delaney’s own writings, from James Baldwin’s writing about Delaney, and from her own experiences of looking closely at Delaney’s work, Cohen seeks to illuminate what Baldwin learned from Delaney first in Greenwich Village, and then in Clamart, as the two men lived together and worked out their ideas about reflection, abstraction, plurality, and self-regard.
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