Beauford Delaney: So Much Love and Beauty

Preview: written before the show opened

The painting the Phillips picked to announce this show is Abstraction #12 from 1963. It is red almost to the edges, with looping strokes laid over flecks of yellow, orange and teal. Delaney, born and raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, made it in the Paris decade that closes the show.

The route starts earlier, with his New York street scenes and portraits of the 1940s, and ends in those abstractions. Along the way you meet the painters he learned from, Claude Monet and Stuart Davis, hung beside friends and contemporaries Lawrence Calcagno, Sam Francis and Ed Clark. Curator Adrienne L. Childs, lecturing at the Met in 2025, traced how he worked through cubism, fauvism and expressionism toward his own abstraction.

The Phillips organised the show and has it first; it moves to the Frist Art Museum in Nashville from 9 July 2027. It is included with general admission ($20, 18 and under and members free), and Third Thursdays are free from 5 to 8pm.