The beauty of creative friendships

I recently walked through an incredible exhibition, Willem de Kooning and Italy, at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, which features about 75 art works that the Dutch-American artist created during the time he spent in Italy in 1959 and 1969. The pieces on display include his ink-on-paper drawings, some gestural drawings, large-scale figurative and abstract paintings, pastoral landscapes and sculptures.

Born in 1904, de Kooning spent the majority of his artistic career as a painter but in 1969, while visiting Rome, he ran into an old friend, the sculptor Herzl Emanuel, who invited him to his foundry and encouraged him to try working with clay. At the age of 65, de Kooning created his first sculptural works, 13 small clay items. It was the beginning of a new artistic era for him and, over the next 15 years, with the encouragement of more friends, sculpture became a defining part of his career.

Later, after I left the exhibition, I was struck by how beautiful and seemingly serendipitous it was that de Kooning began making sculpture because of the initial invitation and encouragement of his friend, and that this fact was included in all the exhibition wall texts and many of the articles I’ve read about him in the past.

It got me thinking about the often unacknowledged role that some friendships play in the creative and generative process of artists across all genres. Which in turn led me to think more broadly about the friendships in our lives that have been especially significant to our vocational or professional development. It’s a unique role we can play in each other’s lives, and an important one on which to reflect.

I first came across the 1891 work “An Evening with a Friend. By Lamplight” by the Danish artist Anna Sophie Petersen while I was researching an assignment at the Hirschsprung Collection in Copenhagen. I was instantly taken by what is known to be a depiction of four of Petersen’s friends. Two recline on a red couch, another sits at a small table nearby, poised to put a glass to her lips, while the fourth, thought to be the violinist Frida Schytte, gives a musical performance. There are plants on another table and on the windowsill, and the room is dimly lit. Petersen captures an intimate scene of solidarity and possibly commiseration. It’s not news that the work of 19th-century female artists was not regarded with the same seriousness as that of their male counterparts. But here, she has created a small world where women appear confident and appreciative of their own talents.

There are a number of well-known creative friendships between artists, including Picasso and Matisse, Van Gogh and Gaugin, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, and Warhol and Basquiat, to name just a few. And it is fascinating to research artist and writer groups and how these creative associations influenced the work of members. The early 20th-century Bloomsbury group, of which Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell were a part, is a famous example; the Zaria Art Society, founded in 1958 by a group of Nigerian art students, is another. This group, which included the now renowned artists Bruce Onobrakpeya and Demas Nwoko, sought to ensure that African art and its influence were included in the study of art history in the midst of ongoing negotiations between a newly forming Nigeria and its colonial past.

We often think about those friendships that journey deeply with us in our private lives, supporting and celebrating us through emotional ups and downs. True gifts indeed. But different people have different roles in our lives, even in friendship. And I wonder if we consider and celebrate enough the friendships that help us persist in our professional goals and aspirations, especially when these feel more like uphill battles or when we might be tempted to lose faith in our own abilities because of external voices.

In 1927, American artist Laura Wheeler Waring painted a memorable portrait of the poet, activist and journalist Alice Dunbar Nelson, a friend she knew from their mutual participation in the women’s club movement for African Americans, organisations focused on social and political reform for Black communities during a time of segregation.

Waring painted Dunbar Nelson sitting upright in a radiant yellow gown and matching hat. Her heeled feet extend just below the hemline. Her arms, cloaked in long black fingerless gloves, sit demurely in her lap, revealing painted fingernails. Her head is held high, and her face is turned to the side as she gazes with quiet assuredness away from the viewer. It is as if it does not matter what we think of her. The important thing is what she thinks of herself. It is a very intentional portrayal of a Black woman at this time in history.

Dunbar Nelson was campaigning in the period as another well-known journalist and activist, Ida B Wells, who fought to end lynching. At a time of intense racism and sexism in North America, it was a significant challenge and danger for a Black woman to be outspoken in any manner, let alone as a high-profile campaigner. In doing so, they were perceived not only as unfeminine but, like many others fighting for justice and civil rights, as agitators acting outside “their place” in mainstream white-ruled and patriarchal society.

Waring knew the power of images and used her own vocation as an artist to depict her friend in an elegant and demure manner that was typically reserved for the portraits of white women. But Waring also painted Dunbar Nelson as someone full of self-confidence, inner resolve and quiet power. I love this painting because, although it may be an extreme example, it represents a friendship based around support for the development and progress of another’s vocation. It makes me wonder how many times there might have been occasions on which we could have said or done something to positively affect a friend’s professional life, but we didn’t, for any number of reasons.

There is a moving black-and-white photograph taken by Max Petrus in 1973 and housed at the Studio Museum in Harlem, titled “Hands of James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney”. It shows three hands; the fingers of the smaller hand, belonging to the writer James Baldwin, are placed firmly between the thicker, wrinkled hands of artist Beauford Delaney. Delaney would have been 72 years old at the time of the photo, and Baldwin around 49. It is a beautiful image that seems to capture both the frailty of life and the strength of friendship.

Despite their age difference, the pair were friends for more than 38 years, and they influenced one another intellectually, spiritually and creatively. Baldwin is claimed to have said that Delaney taught him “how to see and how to trust what I saw”. And Delaney painted more than a dozen works inspired by Baldwin, who seemed to have moved the artist in many ways, including through his commitment to activism and the civil rights movement. Eventually, Baldwin convinced his friend to move to Paris in 1953, and from Europe Delaney’s painting practice, according to Baldwin, took on “a most striking metamorphosis into freedom”.

I do not have friendships that are 38 years old but I do have a friend, also a writer, who has been a consistent intellectual conversation partner for me. We met at a writing workshop and have never lived in the same city, but over the past 10 years our friendship has naturally centred on our creative lives. She is someone who often reads and critiques drafts of my long-form work, someone with whom I dialogue about the writing process and about books, ideas and aspirations.

Friendships that nurture our professional and vocational selves are valuable for many reasons. In offering courage, insight and clarity on the work that we put forth into the world, these friendships not only add to the overall quality of our lives, but underline the value of creative communities more broadly.

Email Enuma at enuma.okoro@ft.com or follow her on X @EnumaOkoro

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