An Artistic Friendship
Catalogue Showcases Work of Two American Artists

University Park, PA--Two important American artists, Beauford Delaney and Lawrence Calcagno, became friends in Paris in the early 1950s. An Artistic Friendship (Palmer Museum of Art, 2001) examines the close artistic and personal friendship between this unlikely pair.

"An Artistic Friendship: Beauford Delaney and Lawrence Calcagno," on display at the Palmer Museum of Art, University Park, Pennsylvania, through May 13, honors the centennial of Delaney's birth. Delaney (1901-79), a black American from Knoxville, Tennessee, spent most of his mature life as an expatriate artist in Paris. Lawrence Calcagno (1913-93), a white American from northern California, spent much of his peripatetic career in the United States and in Europe in search of a place to call home. Delaney and Calcagno became friends in Paris in the early 1950s and remained close over the next twenty years until Delaney's deteriorating mental health removed him from his friends and family.

Both men committed themselves wholeheartedly to lyrical abstraction, though Delaney's work was ultimately influenced more by Claude Monet's fluid water-lily paintings than by the color-field painters so important in Calcagno's formation as an artist.

Both men shared an interest in the philosophical underpinnings of their abstract work. Calcagno's abstract "landscapes of the mind"--with their recognizable and consistent horizons--derived in part from the artist's sense of the universal, yet mysterious harmony of nature.

For Delaney, abstraction gave form to the "higher power" of light in the world, a light that, according to his close friend James Baldwin, "held the power to illuminate, even to redeem and reconcile and heal." Both men experienced the power of melancholia (in Delaney's case, the debilitating effects of mental illness), and both understood well the social isolation accompanying their homosexuality.

The catalogue An Artistic Friendship includes 26 color illustrations. The exhibition will travel to the Hampton University Museum in late summer 2001.

THE AUTHOR
Joyce Henri Robinson is Curator at the Palmer Museum of Art and Affiliate Assistant Professor of Art History at Penn State University. She is the author of several exhibition catalogues, including Musical Notes by Honor° Daumier, Red Grooms and the Heroism of Modern Life, and sva2000.

# # #