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Art, light, and friendship tell the story of celebrated African-American painter Beauford Delaney, who left the segregated South for the heady freedom of the Harlem Renaissance and Bohemian Paris. Famous singers, actors, writers, and artists adored him, Foremost among them his ‘spiritual son,’ writer James Baldwin, who credits his beloved mentor with teaching him how to live, learn, and see. This genial soul, frequently suicidal, was plagued by poverty and schizophrenic voices. Art became his lifeline, and he filled hundreds of bright canvases with joy and hope. Writer Henry Miller called them ‘canticles to the sun.’ Delaney’s journey out of darkness, ‘the misery,’ he called it, ‘of which the jewel of life is formed,’ is a splendid testament to the courage and resilience of a gifted man who found in the mystical marriage of color and shape the healing grace of love.
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