The 'Paris Noir' exhibition at the Pompidou Centre brings together works by African, American, Caribbean and Afro-descendant artists who lived and worked in Paris between the 1950s and the end of the 1990s.
Wifredo Lam, Beauford Delaney, Ernest Breleur, Skunder Boghossian, Christian Lattier, Demas Nwoko, Edward Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Grace Jones... These are just some of the artists whose paintings, film and audiovisual works have gone on display at the Pompidou Centre.
And then there are the American creators famed for their work produced in Paris, including Faith Ringgold, Josephine Baker and author James Balwin. Countries from Cuba, Haiti and Jamaica to Martinique, Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal are also among those represented.
An exhibition like 'Paris Noir' has been long awaited at Paris's flagship modern art museum, despite a strong black, African and Caribbean presence in the French capital, for centuries.
It includes displays on the creation of the seminal magazine Présence Africaine (now also a publishing house) and that of Revue noire, which chronicled the presence and influence of black artists in France between the 1950s and 2000s.
The Pompidou Centre has also included new works by contemporary artists from Transatlantic African American and European communities, such as Jon One, Valérie John, Nathalie Leroy Fiévee, Jay Ramier and Shuck One.
Black consciousness
Eva Barois De Caevel is one of the exhibition curators. "This in-depth work, a historiographical challenge, is now presenting more than 300 works and even more objects and artefacts," she told RFI.
The event is the result of two years of work by the Pompidou Centre's contemporary and prospective creation department, led by Alicia Knock.
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Knock was particularly insistent on including the works of artists who came to Paris in the 1950s, during the period of anti-colonial struggle which was "organised through alliances between the Americas and Africa", thanks to methods of resistance born in the Caribbean since the Haitian revolution.
"We could have called the show 'Paris, Dakar', 'Paris, Lagos', 'Paris, Johannesburg', 'Paris, Havana', 'Paris, Fort-de-France', or 'Paris, Port-au-Prince'... But this would have been a bias that didn't interest us," De Caevel added.
Instead, the museum sought to focus on the idea of a black consciousness, referencing The Black Atlantic, the seminal book by British sociologist and cultural studies academic Paul Gilroy, published in 1993, an exploration of the "double consciousness" of black people in the western world during the modern period.
The curators have included artistic representations of the experience of enslavement and the slave trade, which De Caevel called "unprecedented in the history of humanity, which gives us a common base".
Equally vital to include was the experience of racism, including institutional racism. "This means that these artists were ignored," added De Caevel, "and not considered by institutions – until very recently, or even until today."
Political context
The show is an archive of an immensely rich part of Paris's history, according to the British photographer Johny Pitts, who worked for more than a decade documenting "black Europe" in his book Afropeans.
"It reminds us that, as well as the art, it is important to show the conditions of production of the art, the politics behind the art, the intellectual movements that have helped to spearhead many black artistic traditions," he told RFI. "And I'm really glad because sometimes I feel like that gets lost."
Beyond appreciating the visuals, for him the exhibition helps to highlight the political context in which the art was made.
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"I think it's a very important intervention," he added. "I loved seeing the collection of Présence Africaine, the books all displayed, and also the work of photographers like Haitian Henri Roy, who's one of my favourite photographers and has been going for a long time: here, finally, he gets his credit. There's a lot of work in here that I have seen for the first time, and then artists whose work I actually didn't know. It's just so powerful."
Pitt's photographs were recently exhibited in the French capital by Little Africa, an art space in Paris's Goutte d'or neighbourhood founded by a group of African cultural players.
Curated with Little Africa, numerous art, cultural and educational shows have been scheduled in venues across Paris and the Île-de-France region as parallel events reflecting "black Paris" to run intended with the Pompidou Centre's exhibition.
'Paris Noir' is at the Pompidou Centre in Paris until 30 June, 2025.
