Comment on this story What: Life in the City: The Art of Joseph Delaney When: Thru Oct. 30. Call 974-3200 for info and gallery hours. Where: UT Downtown Gallery

A new gallery, and a new exhibit devoted to an old friend

by Jack Neely

This column is, for what it’s worth, a report on an art show and of a promising new art space. The University of Tennessee’s surprising new Downtown Gallery is just a storefront affair, hardly larger than your average cafe, but there could hardly be a more fitting place in Tennessee to show “Life In the City: The Art of Joseph Delaney” than this spot on the 100 block of Gay, next to the new Emporium development. Delaney is most famous for his urban street scenes depicting diverse crowds of people with little in common except for the streets they share, and this block near the train station was once perhaps Knoxville’s most racially diverse business block, central to the lives of local blacks, rural whites, Jews, Italians. It hosted saloon gunfights, the popular country-music radio show “Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round,” and Knoxville’s first public library. Today it’s home to affluent homesteaders, dozens of trendy college kids and, as long as the shelter’s still here, the transient homeless; it’s the address of one of Knoxville’s few sushi bars and the city’s only kosher deli.

Joseph Delaney fits right in. He was, in fact, born just around the corner. Son of a preacher and little brother of eccentric and better-known artist Beauford Delaney, Joseph Delaney spent about half his youth in Knoxville, the other half in smaller towns around the region where his father preached. As a teenager, Delaney worked as a bellhop in Gay Street hotels, catered to white men’s vices, in a time when downtown was still a buzzing regional wholesaling center. It was, perhaps, here that he grew fascinated by the chaotic interplay of personality and circumstance found only on city streets.

A student, along with his friend Jackson Pollock, of muralist Thomas Hart Benton, Delaney came to deal in an eccentric realism. He was never quite as aesthetically daring or polished as his genius older brother, but equally exuberant—and maybe a shade more sensual.

Delaney’s best-known painting locally may be “VJ Day Parade, Times Square”: the large, colorful canvas depicting whimsically jubilant crowds at the end of World War II has been on permanent display for a couple of decades in one of the most crowded halls of UT’s student union. Over the years, I’ve spent a couple of hours staring at it, usually killing time before a meeting or event. I’ve gotten tired of it. But cleaned up and much better lit, it seems like a whole new painting, and at the gallery I saw details I’d never noticed before. What seemed jubilant at University Center now seems orgiastic. Drunks passing around Kentucky Gentleman, the crowd passing a corpulent woman overhead, mosh-pit style. Jesus, still nailed to his cross, soars overhead, flanked by the two thieves, like a squadron of friendly bombers.

Heads are too big, or too small. Faces are joyfully grotesque, female proportions always swollen, even undulating with sensuous life. He was fascinated with, perhaps more than any other subject, the female form, especially the voluptuous. His hundreds of ink and charcoal sketches of nudes, a few of which are on display here, are homages.

This exhibit demonstrates, almost as a footnote, that Delaney knew how to paint conventionally. His traditional portraits provide juxtaposition for his wilder scenes. Several of the portraits in this show are standard oil portraits of the sort you might have seen hanging above a piano in any number of upper-middle-class homes in the mid-20th century.

And some are merely beautiful, like the serene, gorgeous “Marble Collegiate Church,” a Manhattan chapel anointed by rays of sunlight beneath a Van Gogh sky.

A later tribute to what must have been one of Delaney’s favorite places, “Lobby of the Art Students League,” is relatively orderly and quiet in tone.

But his most definitive paintings are crowded and flamboyant, capturing moments of ephemeral urban ecstasy, like “Central Park Skating.”

You get the impression that Delaney was not very excited by the idea of proportion. His paintings are voluptuous in every respect, happily deranged. His paintings do show some influence of Benton, but they’re more sensual, impulsive, whimsical; Delaney’s most distinctive work embraces, in a big unlikely hug, the old Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens, and Chester Gould, creator of Dick Tracy.

Some of these works cross farther into the realm of cartooning, with mottoes added into blank spots: the charcoal sketch “The Bums’ Clubhouse” shows the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers at their finest hour, under the banner, “When in doubt, shut ‘em out.”

You sometimes wonder if a painter could use a good editor, somebody to suggest, This is good; stop. But just as often with Joseph Delaney, we’re grateful for the excess.

A few paintings in the exhibition have more serious subjects, like a 1936 ink sketch of a “Jobs Not Guns” demonstration. A rare rural scene, a watercolor called “The Circuit Preacher,” is obviously inspired by Delaney’s memories of childhood.

There’s much more of Delaney’s work elsewhere, of course, and this show lacks my favorite painting of any distinctively Knoxvillian scene: Delaney’s “Vine and Central, Knoxville, Tennessee” (1940); the intersection that was once the heart of Knoxville’s creative African-American community was just a diagonal block from this gallery. Early in his career, Delaney chose to depict it on the occasion of the periodic grand entrance of an exotic minstrel parade.

After more than half a century in New York, Delaney returned to Knoxville to spend his last years as an artist in residence at UT; he died here in 1991, and is buried at Greenwood Cemetery.

September 16, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 38 © 2004 Metro Pulse