Beauford Delaney attended art school in Boston and then moved to New York in November 1929. He soon began to earn money by painting portraits of wealthy, high-society people. A lover of jazz and blues music, literature and the theater, Delaney also painted many writers, actors, musicians, and other public figures he admired. He had a warm, outgoing personality, and many of the people he painted became his friends as well as his financial supporters.

Delaney lived in a part of New York City called Greenwich Village. In that vibrant and artistic area, the lively streets and diverse people inspired him. He painted street scenes, parks, jazz clubs, and even his own art studio in the Village. But his paintings were not snapshots of real life. Instead, they expressed how it felt to be in the city. The vivid colors, energetic lines, and quick brushstrokes show that being in Greenwich Village was very exciting.

Beauford Delaney left New York for Paris in August 1953. Traveling to Paris had been his longtime goal. Like many artists, he thought of Paris as the capital of the art world. In search of new adventure, Delaney wanted to immerse himself in art and experience the social and intellectual life of the city’s cafés. He felt that in Paris he would have a greater sense of freedom. As a gay African American man, he faced a lot of discrimination in the United States. Paris was a more tolerant place, where he believed he would be treated with kindness and respect.

His new sense of freedom may be one reason Delaney tried a new way of painting. He made fewer portraits and city scenes, and filled his canvases with bright colors, unusual shapes, and bold lines. His work became more and more abstract, with no recognizable objects or figures. And he experimented with different ways of putting paint on the canvas. For Untitled, Delaney used not just a brush, but also palette knives, his fingers, and colors squeezed straight out of the paint tubes.

Beauford Delaney had never been rich. He grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, the son of a Methodist preacher and a former slave. As an artist living in New York, he faced hard times. To pay for his trip to Paris, he rented out his New York art studio, and friends held a fund-raiser to help with his expenses. By the winter of 1954, however, most of Delaney’s funds were gone. But friends in the United States sent him gifts for Christmas and his birthday, so he could stay on in Paris. Despite shaky finances, he determined to make his time there a success.

The winter of 1953/54 was hard for Delaney. Cold temperatures in Paris hit a record low, and his studio was unheated. He had brought along only a thin old coat and couldn’t afford a new one. With so little money, he couldn’t even buy canvas to paint on. Luckily, sometime around January, he received a gift of a warmer coat, a gift that inspired him in a surprising way. He cut up his old coat. It became a “canvas” on which he created several paintings, including Untitled.