When radiators don’t do the trick, students having trouble coping with one of the coldest winters on record can bask in the warm colors of the new exhibit at the Sert Gallery in the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts.

“It’s the aesthetic equivalent of sunbathing,” said Harry A. Cooper ’81, who curates modern art for Harvard’s art museums and organized “Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow.”

The exhibit features 26 highly textured, vibrant paintings by African-American modern artist Beauford Delaney. Most are dominated by warm, vivid yellows.

“Delaney believed that yellow had joyful, almost spiritual power,” Cooper says.

Placed against white walls and lit both naturally and artificially, the intense colors trigger a feeling of warmth and provide a visual escape from the dull grays of dirty snow.

Delaney’s show is the first ever retrospective of an African-American artist at Harvard’s art museums.

“I’ve always been interested in Delaney,” Cooper says. “I think that he is under-appreciated.”

And the exhibit, which comes to Harvard after a tour along the east coast organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Ga., is the artist’s first retrospective since the artist passed away in 1979.

The show demonstrates Delaney’s two principal styles of painting—portraiture and abstraction—which are rarely seen together in a show focusing on one artist.

Cooper says he was intrigued by this “very strange” combination of both portraits and total abstractions painted concurrently by Delaney.

Portraiture and abstract works of art often involve contrasting techniques.

But Cooper says several of Delaney’s works integrate the two genres.

“I think the figures come out of the abstraction in Delaney’s works,” he says. “Delaney tends to preserve a clear line between the figure and the background.”

Two monumental canvases—“Marian Anderson,” a colorful portrait painted in 1965, and an extremely yellow, abstract untitled work completed four years earlier—share a free-standing wall in the gallery’s center, demonstrating Delaney’s versatility.

Cooper says the latter is his favorite. It features much less texture and much more yellow paint than the rest of Delaney’s work.