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Saturday, August 1, 2015

Beauford Delaney Works Sold at Case Antiques Auctions


A couple of weeks ago, I reported on the auctioning of three Beauford Delaney works by Case Antiques Auctions & Appraisals of Knoxville, Tennessee on July 18, 2015. One of them - the 1971 landscape watercolor on paper - was sold.

Untitled
Watercolor on paper
Signed and dated lower left in red ink, "Beauford Delaney 1971"
Photo courtesy of Case Antiques
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator

The low estimate set for this painting was $2,500.00 and the high estimate was $3,500.00. It sold for $3,186.00*.

The other two paintings from the July auction remain unsold.

Case Antiques sold two Beauford Delaney works at auction in January 2015.

One was a portrait of Beauford's mother, Delia, which Beauford executed from memory in 1964. (Delia Delaney died in 1958.) It was shown in the Studio Museum in Harlem retrospective of Beauford's work in 1978.

Portrait of Delia Delaney
(1964) Oil on canvas
Photo courtesy of Case Antiques
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator

This painting sold for $48,380.00*, an amount that far exceeded the high estimate of $14,000.00.

The other was an untitled abstract of a human face. Remarkably, Beauford's paint cloth and paint stick - both of which have paint residue similar to the paints used for this abstract - were offered for sale with the work.

Untitled (Abstract of Face)
Oil on fabric pillowcase
Photo courtesy of Case Antiques
© Estate of Beauford Delaney
by permission of Derek L. Spratley, Esquire,
Court Appointed Administrator

From the Case Antiques Web site:

Beauford Delaney's departure from New York to Paris in 1953 also marked the transition from figurative compositions to abstract expressionism with a focus on color and light. Strapped with financial challenges in his early Paris years, he was believed to have painted on other found objects if canvas was not available. An example of one of his earliest known dated abstracts is an untitled oil on a raincoat fragment from 1954. This work serves as the cover for Sue Canterbury's book, "Beauford Delaney: From New York to Paris", Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2004. Sue Canterbury, Associate Curator of the Dallas Museum of Art, and Stephen Wicks, Curator of the Knoxville Museum of Art, were able to inspect this work when Ms. Canterbury gave her September 2014 lecture on Beauford Delaney in Knoxville. This Beauford Delaney abstract is only the second documented example of his work using canvas available from household objects.

The "pillowcase" abstract, along with the paint cloth and paint stick, sold for $24,180*. The high estimate for this painting was set at $7,000.00.

To see images of the details of the works shown above, click on the hyperlink in the caption of each image.

For more information about the Beauford Delaney paintings (sold and unsold) at Case Antiques, contact:

Sarah Campbell Drury
Vice President of Decorative Arts
Case Antiques, Inc.
Accredited Member of the International Society of Appraisers (ISA)
Telephone: 615-812-6096


*The prices indicated include an 18% buyer's premium. In auctions, the buyer's premium is a percentage additional charge on the hammer price (winning bid at auction) of the purchased item that must be paid by the winner. It is charged by the auctioneer to cover administrative expenses. The buyer's premium goes directly to the auction house and not to the seller.

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