Feeling Modernist: Beauford Delaney's Self-Portrait (1944)

In this chapter, Levi Prombaum shows how Beauford Delaney’s Self-Portrait (1944) is one of the painter’s most assertive announcements of his identity as a modernist, placing him neither outside nor in opposition to European painting traditions but rather working positively from, and reterritorializing, the modernist frequencies into which he taps—an approach that would deeply impact the work of his protégé, James Baldwin. Self-Portrait (1944) presents itself to students of Western European modernism as a series of formal encounters between Delaney’s painterly persona and three central figures of modern painting: Vincent van Gogh, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. Returning to the painting through affect studies shows how Delaney’s critique of art historical traditions is an outcome of his creative investment in the kind of modernist subjectivity that emphasized the fluidity of interior and exterior, self and other, present and past.