Paris honors the legacy of 20th-century black artists

Here inside Paris’ Pompidou Center, an unprecedented exhibition explores the presence and influence of Black artists in the city from the 1950s to 2000.

It offers visitors a vibrant immersion in France’s cosmopolitan capital and a history of anti-colonial, civil rights struggles.

The ‘Black Paris’ exhibition features the works of about 150 major artists of African descent, many of whom have never or rarely been displayed in France before.

“It’s true that the scale of what we can show today is unprecedented. It’s over 300 works,” says the exhibition’s associate curator Éva Barois De Caevel. “This exhibition should be the starting point for a display that reflects the Parisian and French history that we want to tell.”

After World War II, many African American painters, musicians, and intellectuals flocked to Paris, seeking a sense of freedom that they couldn’t find in the United States at the time.

Paris represented a break from the racial segregation that they faced back home.

The exhibition also shows how many African artists from French colonies — and later former colonies — came to Paris to join a political and intellectual movement, fighting for civil rights and racial justice, while others from the Caribbean were supporting independence movements, which were gaining strength there.

“It really follows this incredible epic of decolonisation in Paris and shows and unpacks Paris as a lab for Pan-Africanism,” says Alicia Knock, curator of the exhibition.

“You will see 50 years of that decolonising story in Paris, and you will see all these artists and how they contributed at rewriting the history of modernism and postmodernism, how these artists reframed abstraction, surrealism and, at the same time, you will see all the Black solidarities that happened at the time, and how these artists really created a Pan-African art history across Black worlds, across the Black Atlantic, from Africa to the Americas.”

For some coming from the U.S. and apartheid South Africa, Paris was seen as an “international Black capital,” says Knock.

“It’s not at all the same thing to arrive in Paris in the ’50s as it is to arrive in Paris in the ’80s or ’90s. In fact, you can clearly see the pendulum swinging in the exhibition, which really begins as Paris, the international Black capital, where indeed, all the artists were fleeing segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa, and the continent was preparing for independence, and independence movements in the Caribbean continued to make themselves felt right up to the present day. Whereas at the end of the exhibition, we’re more concerned with the issue of a Black France, which obviously raises quite different questions,” she says.

The exhibition also includes installations from four artists chosen to provide contemporary insights, including Shuck One, a Black graffiti and visual artist native of the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.

For Barois De Caevel, the exhibition is not about a specific time period or geographical area.

“Some are African Americans, some are Caribbeans, some are Africans, and some are Afro-descendants,” she says.

“The focus is not on the geography or an essentialization, it’s not about the race. It’s more about the Black consciousness, a shared experience that is embodied in the exhibition by the circle in the middle of the exhibition. And here, what you can feel is what is Black consciousness, and it’s a shared experience based on the experience of slavery and based on the experience of racism that is shared by most of the artists of the exhibition,” she explains.

Of the over 300 pieces displayed in the exhibition, the Pompidou Center has acquired around 40 of the artworks, which will remain part of the museum’s collection.

“It’s the beginning. It’s a baby step for many French institutions and many French museums and French universities to start working on these artists, start collecting them, writing about them, preserving their works in their archives and hopefully dedicating a lot of solo shows to many of these artists, because they really deserve. They deserve to be unpacked,” says Knock.

The Black Paris exhibition will run from March 19 to June 30 at the Pompidou Center.

It’s one of the final shows before the museum closes for a five-year renovation later this year.

By Rédaction Africanews