In 1953, Beauford Delaney left his home in New York and moved to Paris at the urging of his friend James Baldwin. This relocation sparked the beginning of a tremendously prolific period in the artist’s oeuvre, during which he focused on two dominant modes of expression: abstraction and portraiture. Delaney’s approach to abstraction in the 1950s and 1960s was rooted in the Tachisme movement, Europe’s equivalent to New York’s Abstract Expressionism. In this 1960 watercolor, Delaney laid out vivid swaths of red and blue and left some areas of the paper support exposed to create a lyrical composition with nuanced spatial dimensionality.