The present pastel by Beauford Delaney, epitomizes the artist's passion for color and the dynamic energy he imbued into his works. A Knoxville, Tennessee, native, Delaney moved to New York in 1929, where he joined a thriving uptown artistic scene. Showing alongside other Black artists, including Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, and Romare Bearden, Delaney played a crucial role in the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s. The artist also befriended the progressive artists in the circle of the well-known photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, most notably developing a congenial relationship with Georgia O'Keeffe. Delaney kept his finger on the pulse of the New York art scene and made a key contribution to the debates concerning representation and abstraction in the pre-war period. In the 1950s, Delaney moved to Paris, where he would continue to live and work for the rest of his life.

While this work was painted in 1960, when Delaney resided in Paris, the concentric outlines harken back to the artist’s more figurative early works on the 1940s. Embodying the space between representation and abstraction, in the present pastel Delaney reimagined a classic modernist subject, a still life of grapes, and injected it with a nonfigurative sense of color and form. The fruit becomes electrified as the jagged outline of grape leaves repeats itself, echoing outwards until bouncing off of the composition's edges. The pastel conveys Delaney's prowess for color and creation. Form is not the only modernist element employed rhythmically in the work, color is also reiterated diversely—for instance, the orange pastel is used as a band of color at the left of the composition, as a sinuous contour towards the work's center, and as articulated highlights on the rounded forms of the grapes and their stems.