the important exhibition that makes Picasso, Baldwin and slippery dialogue | EUROtoday

On Mar 21, 2025

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LUmières on Black Paris ! Light of the brilliant yellow of the portraits of Beauford Delaney, who got here to Paris on the instigation of his good friend James Baldwin who had fled the racism of the United States there and who will spend 25 years there. How stunning Delaney is, and what number of instances on this journey the customer will exclaim by maybe questioning why “we” had hidden these artists to him?

For his final exhibition at 6^e ground earlier than 5 years of closure, the Pompidou middle wins a historic guess with Black Paris. We knew Paris-Berlin, Paris-New York, Paris-Moscow, however shouldn’t be a metropolis? No, a minimum of ten, who intersect within the metropolis of Light, between the Nineteen Fifties and the Nineteen Nineties: Paris, Dakar, Lagos, Abidjan, Port-au-Prince, Fort-de-France, New York or Los Angeles, Le Cap, to call just a few of the connections that this exhibition retraces. Because Paris within the XX^e was on the similar time faculty, assembly, refuge, place to begin, and above all of the emancipation laboratory for African artists from colonized nations, and American, Caribbean creators, as many Afroders marked by the frequent historical past of slavery who disseminated them from the African continent. Stigmatized. Marginalized. Even worse. Hence their black solidarity. And the subtitle of the exhibition: “Artistic circulation and anti-colonial struggles”.

Long invisibilized artists

For ten years, the younger Alicia Knock, a head of the Institution Contemporary and Prospective Creation Service, has been working to revive their place to skills that artwork historical past has not retained. At the tip of a colossal work, carried out with scientific advisers from the areas involved, listed below are greater than 350 works of 150 artists that Paris hub welcomed in these fascinating a long time. The Luce Tournier, Roland Dorcely, Iba N’Diaye, Christian Lattier (if these names don’t inform you something, exactly, go for it!) In the midst of higher identified artists comparable to Augustin Cardenas or Ousmane Sow, who went via this all-round Paris, in response to the considered Édouard Glissant which constructions the scenography.

The exhibition is certainly designed on the idea of the connection, a key to dialogues ô so fertile: right here, Picasso makes the poster for the Congress of African Presence; There, Fernand Léger as Zatkine welcome these artists from all over the place, comparable to Wifredo Lam of their workshops. The South African Ernst Mancoba, who participates within the Cobra movement-and it is usually a guess of the exhibition to place these names again within the historical past of creative movements-, introduced in Paris in 1948 his compatriot Gerard Sekoto: his self-portrait made the poster of Black Paris.

What magnificent discoveries, all generations, as a result of the lengthy -term work of our contemporaries William admitted Wilson (which is the topic of a monograph in Gallimard) is each welcomed as these of Diagne Chanel, AFY NAYO. Among the 4 orders made to artists rereading these a long time of historical past, dazzling is there in opposition to the indigo blue of the set up of Valérie John on the middle of the Glissantian matrix!

Three months appear quick to understand this titanic and historic work, but it surely marks the start of a big motion of acquisitions, monographs, archive analysis, and even the creation of a black Paris fund. To perceive the ins and outs of this extremely wealthy and complicated ensemble, it’s completely essential to dive into the catalog, a brand new quantity of artwork historical past, which additionally illuminates in its points, our creolized societies. But above all, you need to go to Beaubourg, as soon as, thrice, and wander freely in a chronological and thematic journey. Here are some bursts, amongst so many others.

African presence

This is likely one of the bastions that Paris nonetheless retains at the moment, with its unchanged bookstore, rue des écoles. The overview African presence (1947) then publishing home, based by the Senegalese Alioune Diop in Paris opens the exhibition, with an enormous protection of the books of the best authors of the “Black World”. In its middle, right here is the picture of black intellectuals and artists throughout a historic Congress of the Sorbonne in 1956, within the gallery of which Aimé Césaire cried: “Let the black peoples enter the big stage of history”. Today, Black Paris Give a brand new echo to this name: let black artists enter into the historical past of artwork. From these first worldwide exchanges will likely be born the festivals of Dakar, Lagos then Algiers, return to creation to the unique continent.

American black

Here is James Baldwin, who had written on this congress, strolling in Paris together with his good friend Beauford Delaney that he introduced from the United States, Paris being additionally this place of reception for black Americans smothered by racism at house. In the window, an article by Henry Miller, of which Delaney had made the portrait, tells the “slum of rue Vercingétorix which has become a place of pilgrimage”: “we open the door of the tiny apartment and we are immediately flooded with light”.

In Beaubourg, his portraits burst on a yellow background, that of Baldwin, of the singer Marian Anderson particularly. Further on, it’s the edges of Ed Clark who got here to check on the Grande Chaumière, and whose companionship is adopted with Joan Mitchell. From Romare Bearden, we uncover right here the sequence of unpublished collages on his Parisian years punctuated by music: it is Paris Blues.

Martinican Paris

Aimé Césaire, together with his spouse Suzanne and others, by launching the overview Tropicshas already marked the position of consciousness of Martinican writers and thinkers within the creative panorama. In 1946, Édouard Glissant arrived from Martinique, assembly and written repeatedly on the artists of the gallery of the rue du Dragon, together with Cardenas, one of many magnificent pink threads of the exhibition, labored on the UNESCO mail, as earlier than him René Depestre.

Somewhat later, returning to Martinique, he organized the primary exhibition of the good ceramist Victor Anicet, himself handed via Paris on the Paris artwork faculty. Anicet will likely be with René Louise joined by Ernest Breleur and others, one of many founders of the Martinican creative motion Fwomaje. As for his or her compatriot Louis Laouchez, he illustrated the motion of fine of those artists for whom Paris grew to become the place to begin for Africa, since he’ll train in Côte d’Ivoire. Or the return, like plastic artists Paul Ahy in Togo, or Delmas Nwoko in Nigeria, who discovered their faculty of their native nation.

Haitian Paris

We know the historical past of the naive Haitians of Saint-Soleil, which Malraux introduced into the good historical past. But then? The work of Roland Dorcely, who was amongst others a relative of Michel Leiris, reinterpreting Leda and the swan, as a result of all of the imaginary intersects, that of Luce Turnier who handed via the Great Chaumière, summary compositions and delicate portrait of the novelist Yanick Lahens (younger, however she has not modified), from Henri Guédon, to Barbara Prezeau-Stephenson and Élodie Barthélemy at the moment who pays tribute to brown ancestors, all present as a lot vitality as the dearth of recognition of outstanding visible artists.

A serious mission that begins

Impossible to summarize this so plentiful journey, that of the struggles of the sixties, that the archives nonetheless say (La Noire, from the filmmaker Sembène Ousmane), celebrations of the bicentennial of the French Revolution the place Jessye Norman Chante La Marseillaise … The exhibition opened on African presence closes on one other nearer journey: that of Black overviewcreated within the early eighties-years on which the exhibition of enormous black numbers is closed on which, in a pioneer, have mapped Africa and the creative Caribbean for years, and composed an actual sum that collectors tear.

To uncover

The kangaroo of the day

Answer

By the best way, we can have seen the portraits of photographer Henry Roy, pioneer in his method to immortalize – in 1998 – the “black looks” of Maryse Condé to Mc Solaar (1998). Is it over? No. Around the exhibition, Beaubourg devotes a retrospective cycle to the filmmaker Sarah Maldoror, pioneer of Pan -African cinema, whereas one in every of his best movies restored (Sambizanga, Available on Blue Ray DVD at Carlotta). And associates with an inventory of Parisian galleries and varied locations labeled echoes in Paris Black, in addition to to the Kevi Donat information, who didn’t watch for the exhibition to supply his visits to the capital from the angle of black Paris, whose tracks are actually extensive open. Let us additionally quote the colloquiums-events in relation to the Quai Branly, the Campus Condorcet and the EHESS (March 20 to 22). No, it isn’t completed, in actuality, this main mission is simply simply starting …

Paris Black 1950-2000, Center Pompidou, till June 30.

https://www.lepoint.fr/culture/paris-noir-l-exposition-incontournable-qui-fait-dialoguer-picasso-baldwin-et-glissant-21-03-2025-2585292_3.php