The Artist Who Taught James Baldwin to Write Like a Painter

In his 1985 nonfiction anthology The Price of the Ticket, James Baldwin wrote of his dear friend Beauford Delaney that the painter was “the first walking, living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist.” In death, James Baldwin’s oeuvre has been dissected by devoted readers and scholars, his public persona elevated to godlike status. But they ring incomplete without acknowledgment of Baldwin’s closest ally, dearest friend, and most salient mentor, whom he called his “primary witness” according to David Leeming, friend and biographer to both. The relationship would transform both artists in immeasurable ways, creatively and emotionally, in the face of the extreme racism and homophobia that tormented them.

Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin, released in February, traverses the pair’s respective works and close-knit creative and personal relationship. In the book’s introductory essay, “The Bond of the Unusual Door,” Leeming describes Baldwin and Delaney’s first encounter in 1940, after a mutual friend directed young Baldwin to Delaney’s Greenwich Village apartment. The painter “reconciled for his pupil the music of the Harlem streets and clubs with the music of the Harlem churches — and, by extension, the boy’s sexual awakening with his artistic awakening.” Baldwin’s first passage through this threshold marked his entry into the social world of downtown Manhattan and offered a new encounter with queer experience. Then a youth preacher, Baldwin’s relationship to this queer Black man revolutionized his cultural perspective and imagination. He could hear blues and jazz music with open ears, observe art with open eyes, and begin to accept and explore new possibilities. 

The two loved each other fiercely. Still, Baldwin and Delaney’s own relationship was troubled by its own nuances over their decades together. For a painting titled “Dark Rapture” (1941), teenage Baldwin posed nude for his adult mentor, a detail which is mostly bypassed in Speculative Light. Both men struggled with suicidality, and Delaney was tormented by intense auditory hallucinations castigating his Blackness and queerness. As they aged, Baldwin cared intently for his friend, sometimes cohabitating for extended periods to aid Delaney’s mental health struggles prior to his extended hospitalization at the end of his life. Though the two never had a romantic relationship, Leeming says Delaney was “in love” with his mentee. In Delaney, however, Baldwin said he had found a “spiritual father” who guided him in art-making and life alike. Magdalena J. Zaborowska’s essay on this dynamic contrasts Baldwin’s “irreconcilable black father figures” — his stepfather David Baldwin as the “heteropatriarchal religious one” and Delaney as the “queer bohemian.”

In 1965, Baldwin wrote of Delaney’s greatest lesson, imparted when the duo had gone walking around Greenwich Village “in poverty and uncertainty.” Pointing to the iridescent surface of an oil-slicked puddle, the painter urged the young writer to look — nothing special — and then “look again” as the colors underwent “a most disturbing and salutary change.” In her especially potent essay, Indie A. Choudhury describes this phenomenon as “Delaney’s almost extrasensory sight.” This moment’s impact was so great that Baldwin recounted the story again to the Paris Review in 1984. “He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw,” he recalled. “Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.” This lesson would irrevocably shift the course of Baldwin’s writing. Baldwin saw the world differently with Delaney in his court. Colors shifted, transformed, brightened. He looked twice. Through Delaney, we can understand Baldwin’s writing as painterly. In his essay, Robert G. O’Meally describes Baldwin as “picturing characters and scenes in words with deliberate uses of color, textures, and layers; enlisting strategies most closely associated with painting.” Zaborowska compares “Delaney’s seductive, sophisticated visual trickery” and Baldwin’s “visionary and tactile, sensory and metaphorical” prose. 

They were “paying attention in a fervent, even devout way,” writes Rachel Cohen in the essay “Shared Subjects.” Both the progeny of preachers, there is a religiosity to Delaney’s affecting paintings and Baldwin’s writings, not only through the influence of Black Christian spirituality but also a near pious devotion to form, to beauty; an obsessive preoccupation with interiority. Delaney’s devotion manifested in his many depictions of himself, including careful studies of his own eyes, and of Baldwin, whom he painted many times. (Baldwin described Delaney as having “the most extraordinary eyes I’d ever seen.”) These paintings appear in a slice of pages in Speculative Light with bright, sleek reproductions of Delaney’s work, which are almost all dominated by shades of yellow. Baldwin saw Delaney’s artworks as holy, imbued with light that “held the power to illuminate, even to redeem and reconcile and heal.”

Speculative Light is challenging; it’s a daunting, thick brick of a textbook, with deep-cut references to Baldwin’s oeuvre that made me paw for old copies on my shelves and search for short stories and essays I’ve yet to read. It’s worthwhile, with gems abounding in several essays, like those by Choudhury and O’Meally, or by Hilton Als and Shawn Anthony Christian. This book peers into an intimate relationship between two Black, queer men who grappled with the harsh lens of shame and found solace in their art and one another; two friends, platonic lovers, mentor and mentee, who knew each other in ways their voracious public could not. We owe much of Baldwin’s oeuvre to Delaney, and we owe it to Delaney to look again.

Speculative Light: The Arts of Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin (2025), edited by Amy J. Elias, is published by Duke University Press and is available online and through independent booksellers.