‘The colour of my skin didn’t matter’: exhibition shines light on black artists in postwar Paris | Exhibitions

For many black artists and intellectuals, postwar Paris was a cosmopolitan hub. While colonisation, racism and segregation cast a shadow over their countries of origin, the City of Light appeared then a more liberated place where they were free to mix, study, work and create.

Now, a new exhibition – the last major event at Paris’s Pompidou Centre before it closes for a five-year renovation in September – explores the “unrecognised and fundamental” contribution these artists made to the French capital and how it influenced them.

A visitor looks at an artwork by French artist Georges Coran, titled Delire et paix. Photograph: Christophe Petit-Tesson/EPA

This vibrant final show brings together 350 works by 150 artists of African heritage, many of whom have been historically sidelined or forgotten and who the museum says are being given the recognition they deserve for the first time in France.

The Pompidou, Paris’s primary showcase for modern and contemporary art, describes it as an “unusual project”. Paris Noir (Black Paris) “celebrates artists who persisted in their commitment to create” despite being ignored by most cultural institutions at the time and for whom Paris was an essential part of their journey.

Alicia Knock, the exhibition’s lead curator, said: “It is a story that hasn’t been told and should be. The exhibition allows us to see the richness of these artists who came to Paris, many of whom were also philosophers and poets and whose works have not been seen before in France.”

Everlyn Nicodemus is one of the artists being displayed. Photograph: Jordan Macy/The Guardian

Paris had attracted African American artists even before the second world war. The celebrated Boston-born artist Loïs Mailou Jones arrived in the city on a fellowship in 1937 and marvelled at the positive response she received when painting was displayed outside on the streets. “The French were so inspiring. The people would stand and watch me and say ‘mademoiselle, you are so very talented. You are so wonderful.’ In other words, the colour of my skin didn’t matter in Paris …” she said of her time in the capital.

Mailou Jones, who died in 1998 and whose work features in the exhibition, later returned to the US and set up the Little Paris Studio Group, a salon to provide local artists of colour with training and an outlet to show their work.

Other artists featured include Chéri Samba, one of the most renowned contemporary African artists from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, African American Sam Middleton and James Baldwin’s close friend Beauford Delaney, as well as the Cuban Wifredo Lam and the Tanzanian-born, Edinburgh-based artist and writer Everlyn Nicodemus.

The exhibition is the last major show for the Paris venue before it closes for a five-year renovation. Photograph: Christophe Petit-Tesson/EPA

After Delaney died in 1979, Baldwin wrote in a tribute that he was “the first living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist”. But for decades his legacy was forgotten.

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For Knock, the exhibition is the culmination of a decade’s work to fill what she discovered was a “major gap” in the Pompidou’s collection. Many of the artists featured remain unknown to a wider public.

At least 50 of the works in the exhibition have been acquired by the Pompidou. Knock hopes they will be included in its permanent exhibition when the museum opens again in 2030 after an estimated €262m refit of the 50-year-old building.

“It’s a way for the museum to be more global, more inclusive and also about honouring the artists. As a last exhibition before the museum closes for five years it is spectacular but it’s part of a longer-term project,” Knock said.

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