Photo By Gail

Artist Beauford Delaney (1907 – 1979) met writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin in 1940. Finding common ground on multiple fronts – intellectual, social, and artistic – the two gay men began a friendship that would last 38 years.

Dark Rapture (1941) , the first of Delaney’s several portrays of Baldwin, presents the author in a thickly painted, expressive tonal study of red, browns, and blues against a brightly hued landscape. Both introspective and joyous, Dark Rapture stands as visual manifestation of queer camaraderie, identity, and the search for belonging in the modern world.

Photographed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan as Part the Exhibit The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, on view Through July 28th, 2024.