“The Giacometti Effect”

In this chapter, Stephen C. Wicks examines how one painting by Beauford Delaney, James Baldwin (1966), stands apart from all of Delaney’s many portraits of the writer in its atypically narrow color scheme of yellow and black, tangled angular contours, openwork structure, and absence of physical likeness. Evidence suggests this unusual handling may have been triggered by the influence of Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, a prominent artist of Delaney’s acquaintance. The Delaney bust’s distinctive linear structure and attenuated proportions—absent in earlier portraits of Baldwin from 1965 and 1967—recall those present in Giacometti’s Portrait of James Lord. At the forefront of Delaney’s thoughts was the book detailing the anguished compositional method through which Giacometti’s image of Lord took shape, and like Giacometti, Delaney viewed portraiture as presenting the dual challenge of revealing the eternal through the depiction of the temporal. This essay explores possible influences on Delaney’s work by Giacometti, as they circled one another in only occasionally intersecting social and artistic orbits.