Amazing grace

the long version

In Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney David Leeming tells the story of one of the most important black artists of our time. In chronicling Delaney's remarkable trajectory from a strong religious family in Knoxville to his death in a Parisian insane asylum, Leeming maintains a dual focus on Delaney's troubled inner life - his complicated homosexuality and the "voices" that would drive him mad - and his vibrant external life - his friendships with an amazing range of writers, artists, and musicians. In many ways, Delaney's life focuses the major currents of twentieth century art. Leeming quotes generously from the journals, notebooks, letters, and critical reviews, tracing Delaney's movement away from representation - the street scenes and portraits of his "blues aesthetic" - into the abstract paintings where his dominant concern is with the "architecture" of color and a religious sense of light that "held the power to illuminate, even to redeem and reconcile and heal.". Amazing Grace illuminates both the work and milieu of a major black talent and gives us a portrait of a man spiritually devoted to his art, a man we would have very much liked to know and who, after closing the book, we feel we have known.