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At the Centre Pompidou hangs a dense, colorful ink painting on cotton in which two figures with white faces and blue skin hold court in a lush thicket of flora and fauna. According to the work’s title, they are Delirium and Peace. Measuring 7.4 by 9.7 feet, Délire et paix (1954) by Georges Coran still packs a punch more than 70 years later.
The artist’s daughter, Claude Coran, had lent the work to the Pompidou for the blockbuster exhibition “Paris Noir: Artistic circulations and anti-colonial resistance 1950–2000,” an overdue correction of sorts that aims to shed light on the vibrant community of Black artists active in Paris during the latter half of the 20th century. Born in 1928 on the island of Martinique, Coran père spent the majority of his life in the French capital, where he died in 2017. Despite this, his art, which draws influence from the mythology and symbolism of Martinque and often inserts Black figures into scenes referencing Western art history, had never before received such prominence in France. Upon seeing the painting, a centerpiece of “Paris Noir,” Coran fille was overcome with emotion.
“Seeing his artworks here is like a violent jolt. It’s extraordinary, because we’re here, in Beaubourg,” she told ARTnews, referring to the Pompidou’s Parisian nickname. “This isn’t just any museum.”
Georges Coran is just one of the 150 largely underrecognized artists who feature in “Paris Noir” (on view through June 30), which brings together some 350 of their wide-ranging artworks, spanning sculpture, painting, film, photography, and textiles, as well as archival materials, to examine their significant contributions to art history. The exhibition itself is a landmark, the first time a major museum in France has surveyed artists of African descent active in the postwar era, and includes sections dedicated to “Afro-Atlantic abstractions,” Surrealism, anti-colonial activism, and the translation of jazz into visual forms, while drawing connections to intellectual figures like Édouard Glissant, Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, Sédar Senghor, and James Baldwin. It powerfully makes the case that amid stark racism, continued colonial rule, and independence movements, these artists wrote their own art history.
A strength of the show is how it draws out the myriad of individual lived experiences and styles of these international diasporic artists, not all of whom were directly responding to the politics of the day. At the same time, “Paris Noir” highlights how the City of Light served as both a geographic and artistic nexus for these creators, influencing their practices and bringing them into contact with each other. Here, they formed their own art ecosystems around universities, galleries, cafés, and publications like Présence Africaine, which published its first issue in 1947.
One of these nodes is the generations of African American artists who were drawn to Paris, including Ed Clark, Beauford Delaney, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, and Ming Smith. Artists like Clark (helped financially by the G.I. Bill) and Delaney came to the city to further their artistic explorations in the decade following World War II. In France, they felt “liberated,” according to the wall text, where racial discrimination was far less severe than both men knew, having grown up in the segregated South during Jim Crow. In Paris, Clark was able to develop his unique approach to abstraction that he called a “big sweep,” in which he used a push broom to spread paint across his canvases, as evinced by Untitled (Vétheuil), from 1967, made while sharing a studio with Joan Mitchell in the village of Vétheuil, about 1.5 hours northwest of Paris. Baldwin, who lived in Paris from 1948 and 1957, was a friend of Clark and Delaney’s during this period; his image and commentary recur in much of the exhibition, including via a ca. 1945–50 portrait by Delaney.
In the 1990s, Lovelace O’Neal was also drawn to the city by a still active Black intelligentsia that included Nina Simone, Toni Morrison, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Raymond Saunders, and Dewey Crumpler, among others. Her powerful, 11-foot-wide Purple Rain (ca. 1990) shows a somewhat abstracted figure whose outstretched arms emerge from a dripping, color-swathed center, a self-portrait and representation of the artist’s travels in the Sahara and Atacama deserts, completed before and after her time in Paris. Photographer Ming Smith came earlier, in the ’70s, encountering dancers Josephine Baker and Alvin Ailey. In “Paris Noir,” she has on view several images, including a self-portrait as Baker and a double-exposure photograph, showing Baldwin’s face superimposed over Harlem’s skyline.
But the curators also carefully disassemble this mythic vision of Paris, when looking at artists who came to the French capital in order to advance their professional careers, particularly when hailing from its former colonies in Africa and Haiti, as well as its current overseas territories in the Caribbean, like Martinque and Guadeloupe. Artists with this diasporic experience have spoken of “realizing” they were Black and encountering racism for the first time, upon arrival in Paris. While grants may have helped them get to Paris, many struggled to make ends meet once there.
Martinique-based artist Valérie John, who went to study in Paris in the ’80s, said “the reality was different from the myth that was told to us,” adding that her generation believed Paris to be akin to the fabled city of gold, El Dorado. At the center of the Pompidou show, she has created a multimedia installation, Secret(s) …Rêves de Pays… Fabrique à Mémoire(s)…Palimpseste… (1998–2025), that represents a kind of indigo ocean, filled with hanging objects and an amalgamation of sounds from Africa and the Caribbean. She hopes it can help “heal” from that “first shock” of racism, she and others experienced when first arriving in France, as well as “the original wound” of enslavement, she said. “There is a pain that comes with going on a voyage, and it’s a pain that will mark us. That is what happened to me … in response, I had to identify and find my position in the world.”
John calls her installation a “palimpsest” of accumulated memories, with its altar-like construction that includes painted-and-collaged open boxes containing carved wooden masks, imagery and gestural markings connecting Césaire, Glissant, and Senghor, with the capital cities of Martinique and Senegal, via Paris, according to a wall text. Its use of indigo-painted walls and floors refers to the transatlantic slave trade, as well as the dye’s magical significance in Africa and the Caribbean. Together with the exhibition, John said she hopes the work will serve as a catalyst for recognition of Black creators, and act as a unifying force.
“This exhibition is a chance to come together as a people, whom I call an archipelago,” she added.
While canon-expanding exhibitions like “Paris Noir” have been staged over the past decade in the US and UK, the show’s focus on Black artists has itself been the subject of controversy within France. Its title refers to a series of Pompidou exhibitions from the 1970s that looked at Paris’s connections with other cities, including “Paris-New York” (1977), “Paris-Berlin” (1978) and “Paris-Moscow” (1979). But in a country that, broadly speaking, favors assimilation and a “colorblind” social ideal—official demographic statistics on ethnicity are forbidden, though data on “descendants of immigrants” are collected—as a way to safeguard equality, the show is a bold political statement. “The French political system has proven impervious to questions of race, as with redefining questions of sovereignty in a post-colonial era,” Alicia Knock, one of the exhibition’s five cocurators, writes in the accompanying catalog.
To mount it, Knock said she had to navigate “incredibly complex” hurdles over the course of the past decade, including relying on major funding from two US foundations, the Ford Foundation and Terra Foundation for American art. The Trump administration’s recent anti-DEI policies in the US, she said, have only heightened the scrutiny the exhibition is facing because France still has “much work to do on these topics, and we need the American framework to make that happen,” she said, noting that French universities lack programs on post-colonial and Black studies. “This show has always been a lot more than just an exhibition. It’s always been a way to foster and trigger institutional change, so that we’re not just ticking a box.”
That institutional change is beginning to happen within the Pompidou, which has set up a fund to acquire works from the exhibition. So far, 40 pieces, including Coran’s Délire et paix, Roland Dorcély’s Leda and the swan (1958), Diagne Chanel’s Le Garcon de Venise (1976), Guido Llinás’s Pintura Negra (1968), and Mildred Thompson’s Radiation Explorations 8 (1994) have joined the permanent collection.
“This exhibit will spark all kinds of debate, but that is also the point,” said independent curator Nadine T. Hounkpatin, who did not work on the exhibition but has organized several exhibitions looking at artists from Africa and its diaspora.
Some of the exhibition’s artists shared concerns that the show could have the effect of boxing them into a racially define label, but they stressed the importance of shining a light on their underrecognized contributions and those of artists who are no longer living, especially for younger generations.
Afi Nayo, who was born in Togo in 1967 and has lived in Paris most of her life, has on view a spellbinding semi-abstract painting depicting a crowd of individuals in earthen tones who are partially scratched out. “Since I never found my place among Africans or Europeans,” she told ARTnews, “it was always important to me that one could not simply say that my painting is African and be placed in a box. I never wanted that.”
Zaituna Kala, an emerging artist who was born in 1987 and is therefore not featured in the exhibition, said a show like “Pairs Noir” is “needed so that it can bring the institution up to date,” but warned that a historical show like this “is in complete decalage [lags behind] with what is happening today, and what will happen tomorrow.” When the Centre Pompidou reopens in five years (or more) after renovations, the museum will need “to deal with artists of today, and in a modern way.” She added, “Paris Noir” may occupy “an important place historically for the institution, but we’re not the institution. … We are artists, so we do what we need to do, when we need to do it, and the historians will catch up later.”