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Daily Maverick
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
A shared lens on labour: Gerard Sekoto and Lena Hugo in dialogue
An exhibition of Lena Hugo and Gerard Sekoto's art captures the life of labour. Figures appearing at the car window imploring the occupants to buy Chinese sunglasses, multicoloured feather dusters, belts and silver balloons that dance in the hot sun. Sound familiar? An old man trying to direct the traffic when the lights have failed, a street juggler hoping for a small token of appreciation, road workers digging, their sweat glistening. You could say it's a slice of urban life, not particularly significant, not particularly noteworthy. Yet, for Gerard Sekoto, early 20th-century artist, profound thinker and recently the face of the Paris Noir exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, it was this sort of snapshot that dictated his choice of subject throughout his life. The same could be said of contemporary South African artist Lena Hugo, whose childhood was dominated by the mine-heaped landscape of Roodepoort, with its politically charged atmosphere of the time – factors, she says, that strongly influenced her creative direction. While she and Sekoto couldn't be more different in background and age, their deep commitment to representing work and labour in the past century is uncannily similar. It is this double-etched narrative that is featured in an exhibition hosted by Strauss & Co in Johannesburg, entitled Working Life in South Africa: Gerard Sekoto & Lena Hugo, running until the end of May. Curator Wilhelm van Rensburg, a senior art specialist and head curator at Strauss & Co, reiterates that the aim of the exhibition is to demonstrate through selected paintings the strong synergy between the artists. 'In the work of Gerard Sekoto, we see nannies, washerwomen, brickmakers, coal merchants, miners, barbers, shopkeepers, street photographers, water drawers, endeavours that typified the world that workers created for themselves in the first half of the 20th century. 'Juxtaposed with Sekoto's paintings are depictions of workers by Lena Hugo, mainly of heavy machinery operators, in the working life of the 21st century.' Commenting on the exhibition, art writer, photographer and curator Nkgopoleng Moloi says Sekoto and Hugo's practices make visible the social structures that shape labour. 'Read together, they highlight the ways in which workers are portrayed but also how their experiences are understood and remembered. In this sense, they offer a form of social realism that insists on the visibility of labour and the dignity of those who perform it.' Among the paintings on show for this exhibition is Sekoto's iconic political composition Song of the Pick, which focuses on the often back-breaking work undertaken by labourers. Van Rensburg describes Sekoto's painting as a classic example of his artistic exploration of the relationship between the economically powerful and the vulnerable. 'He achieved this using a direct, concrete approach based on what countless people had either experienced or witnessed. 'Although [it was] painted in 1942, one could say that little has changed since the ushering in of the democratic order; labourers who obtain employment are still predominantly black.' Hugo takes the narrative two generations ahead, focusing on the relationship between work and worker, making the viewer aware of the face of labour, which we may not always be aware of, though they form an important part of our landscape, economy, community and life. Her 2008 painting The Seamstress, for example, brings us up close and personal with a woman who works in the clothing industry. Gerard Sekoto Born in 1913 in Botshabelo, just outside Gauteng, Sekoto was drawn to art as a child and would practise drawing on his school slate, and used clay from the river banks to make small sculptures. He was a pioneer visual artist who made many paintings portraying the harsh socioeconomic realities of life for black folks in urban South Africa. He did so by standing on street corners and capturing people in their domestic and everyday activities, such as hanging laundry up to dry. In 1947 Sekoto fulfilled his childhood dream of being an artist in Paris, through what he called a 'self-imposed exile'. Back in South Africa in 1989, Wits University awarded him an honorary doctorate, helping him in his move to a retirement home for artists where he could paint and converse with friends until his death in 1993 at the age of 79, just one year before Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa. Lena Hugo For more than 30 years, exhibiting widely in group and solo exhibitions locally and abroad, Lena Hugo has portrayed ordinary people and workers. Her work highlights the dignity of her subjects and serves as a visual archive of labour and identity in South Africa. A key theme in Hugo's work is highlighting the fundamental significance of having a job – not only as a means of survival but also for its impact on psychological wellbeing and a sense of belonging. Hugo vividly remembers one of her most compelling memories originating from her childhood: her special relationship with Ngoanang William Matseba, a man who worked as the family gardener. She describes William as a protective, father figure who would reward her with Chappies bubblegum for garden chores well done. Although he was treated well by her family, she still remembers with sadness his plate and cup stored in a cupboard under the kitchen sink, separated from the rest of the family's crockery. William would later become a central figure in her portraits and the most-often depicted worker in her portfolio. DM The exhibition Working Life in South Africa: Gerard Sekoto & Lena Hugo is on at the Strauss & Co gallery in Johannesburg until the end of May. This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
The Guardian
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Basquiat to Delaney: inside the exhibition honouring 50 years of art in Black Paris
Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. I was in France at the weekend to check out the Paris Noir exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, an odyssey through the generations of Black artists from across the world who found a complicated sanctuary in the city. This was supplemented with a walking tour on the life of the artist Beauford Delaney, guided by the company Entrée to Black Paris, and finished off with a mind-blowingly delicious Senegalese dinner. Yes, I'm trying to make you jealous. That's all after the roundup. You're invited into Paris Noir by the frank, sobering gaze of its lead exhibition image: a self-portrait by the South African artist Gerard Sekoto completed in 1947. A modernist, expressionist work with bold, contrasting colours seeming to convey unease, reflection and solemnity, Sekoto painted it days before travelling to London as a self-imposed political exile from South Africa. That year, he would arrive in Paris where he faced difficult living conditions, finding employment as a jazz pianist and singer of South African melodies and Negro spirituals at the nightclub l'Échelle de Jacob (Jacob's ladder). Of the 150 Black artists across 350 works exhibited, many of them have stories like Sekoto's – coming from the US, Caribbean, South America and Africa to find an artistic refuge in Paris. The scope of the exhibition is expansive, an excavation of artistic movements from Afro-Atlantic surrealism to Parisian syncretism. There's paraphernalia from Présence Africaine, the pan-African culture magazine founded by the Senegalese writer and editor Alioune Diop in the 1940s (to which Sekoto contributed), theological meditations in the Ivorian sculptor Christian Lattier's 1957 work Le Christ, and subversions of US racial stereotypes in advertising and comics abstracted into a collage by the French-Haitian artist Hervé Télémaque. What emerges from this vast collection is a beautiful sense of the Black Atlantic. Of artists and writers and thinkers pouring in from across the globe, finding a haven in which aesthetic expressions, debates and dialogues were forged in a world contending with decolonisation through pro-independence movements in Africa and the Caribbean as well as western civil rights struggles. They often documented these times: Bob Thompson depicted US lynchings and the violent quashing of civil rights protests; Sekoto covered the tragic revolutionaries in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia). But political art was not only of the world outside France. In May 1967, in response to a racist attack, riots broke out in Guadeloupe, a Caribbean island that morphed from a colony to an overseas department. Protesters were violently suppressed by French police, who opened fire on striking workers in the economic capital, Pointe-à-Pitre. In 1975, the French Guianese artist José Legrand painted a photorealistic diptych of a scene from the demonstrations. In this Parisian Black Atlantic, the refining of method and a collaborative, artistic corpus flourish. Networks and friendships are formed. Black artists enter one another's orbits and are moved to create even greater works. In the 1990s, the Senegalese artist As M'Bengue created a visual language in his paintings, with its graffiti, graphic art and anti-capitalist social criticism, inspired by the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, whom he had met in Paris in 1988. Equally, the abstract, impressionist works of Ed Clark, which includes an untitled painting of three bold strokes created by a 'big sweep' technique, are inspired by the works of his friend Beauford Delaney. If Sekoto is the face of the Paris Noir exhibition, then Delaney is its beating heart. The first piece in your line of sight when you enter the show is his 1968 painting Street Scene (Paris), a sunny, hazy vision of the city through thick, swirling yellow brushstrokes applied using his signature impasto technique, reminiscent of the style of Vincent van Gogh. Tennessee-born Delaney features in all corners of the exhibition, his work relevant to discussions of abstraction, representation, political resistance and portraiture. Delaney's life was fascinating but tragic, as I learn from Monique Y Wells of Entrée to Black Paris, which provides guided walking tours of Black Parisian history, culture and contemporary life (and which I cannot recommend enough). Wells takes me on a stroll through Montparnasse, a neighbourhood steeped in history. As Wells tells me, Henry Ossawa Tanner, often described as the first famous African American painter, came to live in Paris in the late 19th century, which became a draw for other African American artists to arrive. After the second world war, US legislation provided a package of benefits including education funding, low-interest loans and low-cost mortgages for returning veterans to readjust to civilian life and access opportunities. As such, Montparnasse received a wave of African Americans travelling to Paris to attend art schools. Though Delaney was not a veteran, it was this pre-established enclave that he was welcomed into when he moved to Paris on the invitation of his friend James Baldwin in 1953. Wells tells me that Montparnasse was 'in effect a slum' with ramshackle properties – meaning that poor artists such as Delaney could afford to live and create there. There were a number of bouillons, inexpensive restaurants, that Delaney would frequent, such as the Les Mille Colonnes. Wells also takes me to the site of La Bohème, a former club exclusively for white GIs who had imposed their racist attitudes on to post-second world war French proprietors. It was eventually taken over by Buttercup Powell, the girlfriend of the musician Bud Powell, who transformed the premises into Buttercup's Chicken Shack - a space where musicians and artists could eat cheaply, and where the Trinidadian jazz pianist Hazel Scott played. In the Paris Noir exhibition, the affectionate relationship between Delaney and Baldwin is honoured. As Black gay men, with Delaney struggling with acceptance of his sexuality, their friendship was especially important in light of the hardships and social pressures they faced. Next to a Delaney painting of Baldwin is a quote by the Giovanni's Room author: 'I learned about light from Beauford Delaney: the light contained in everything, in every surface, in every face.' Delaney created more than a dozen works featuring or inspired by Baldwin, presenting him in different modes – from the majestic intellectual thinker to the compassionate source of warmth and intimacy he had come to know so well. Sign up to The Long Wave Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world after newsletter promotion That intimacy is key to Delaney's work, as is the prominence of colour and light – particularly yellow, a pigment for hope that, with the raised textures of impasto, captured a yearning for freedom and happiness in contrast to his real life circumstances. His textures seem to capture sound through image: he uses yellow impasto brushes to paint the contralto and civil rights figure Marian Anderson, reminiscent of Byzantine iconography. As the exhibition text reads, the portrait 'vibrates like a strange music'. The tragic details of the artist's life that I learned on the walking tour added a poignancy to his works. As Wells tells me, Delaney lived in poverty and struggled with mental illness for much of his life. He spent the final years before his death in 1975 in hospital 'for the insane' . Much like Delaney is threaded throughout the exhibition, he is also felt everywhere in this corner of Paris. There are numerous plaques for residences and restaurants he frequented, and so many cafés he would sit outside for hours, people watching and doodling - La Bohème, La Select, La Coupole. At the end of the weekend I'm left with a sense that Paris, as a crossroads for the meeting of Black artists and cultures, has a strong claim for being one of the great Black diasporic cities – something Monique Wells tells me is under-discovered, and continues to surprise people. I finished my time in the French capital with a visit to Waly-Fay restaurant, which serves traditional Senegalese cuisine, and ate one of the best meals of my life – fish pèpè soup, suya skewers breaded in cassava flour and chicken yassa, washed down with a hibiscus drink. I wondered about the Black artists of today who come through here, making plans for radical work and sharing ideas over incredible food. Paris Noir is at the Pompidou Centre until 30 June. To receive the complete version of The Long Wave in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here.
BBC News
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The pioneering building that scandalised Paris
The daring, radical Pompidou Centre was derided by many when its design was first unveiled – yet it has continued to influence the architecture of public buildings ever since. As the building approaches a major renovation, its co-creator Renzo Piano recalls the furore. This summer, the Centre Pompidou will close for five years, as Paris's popular polychrome landmark undergoes changes necessitated by current requirements in terms of health, safety and energy efficiency. French studio Moreau Kusunoki Architects, Mexican practice Frida Escobedo Studio and French engineer AIA Life Designers will undertake a major overhaul of the six-storey arts centre, containing Europe's largest museum of modern art. Its renovation will add usable floor space, remove asbestos from all facades, improve fire safety and accessibility for people with reduced mobility, and optimise energy efficiency. As far as possible, the original building will be conserved as it was before. To do otherwise might be considered cultural sacrilege – after all the Pompidou's identity is indivisible from its original architects, Renzo Piano, and the late Richard Rogers. The duo set up their practice, Rogers + Piano, in 1970, and submitted a design to a prestigious competition instigated in 1971 by Georges Pompidou, France's President from 1969 until 1974. Its jury was headed up by Jean Prouvé, a metalworker and self-taught architect, and included such stellar architects as Philip Johnson and Oscar Niemeyer. Piano and Rogers' design was chosen from 681 competition entries. The result caught the duo, then unknowns in their 30s "with Beatles haircuts", as Piano puts it, by surprise: "We didn't think we'd win, we entered the competition for pleasure," the Italian architect, now 87, tells the BBC. "We never planned to create a revolutionary building. Our idea was a museum that would inspire curiosity, not intimidate people, and that would open up culture to all." In fact, the duo's insouciance may help to explain the building's uninhibited boldness, flamboyance and ludic quality. Its structural elements and services were placed on its facades, allowing it to maximise its internal, open-plan spaces – and prompting the futuristic structure to be dubbed the world's first "inside-out" building. Its exoskeleton of tubes and periscope-like pipes were playfully colour-coded: blue for air air-conditioning, yellow for electricity, green for water and red for pedestrian circulation. Visitors streamed up escalators – encased in transparent tubing affording panoramic views – that were designed to reinforce the museum's connection to the city. "Our idea was for the building to take up only half the site, allowing for a welcoming outdoor place – a piazza – where people could meet," says Piano, whose other projects include the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco (rebuilt in 2008), the Shard (2012) in London, and the recently completed Paddington Square, also in the UK capital, a mixed-use building and public square. "Our credo was a place for all people – for the poor and rich, the young and old." The Pompidou's transparency, accessibility and adjacent piazza chimed with new ideas about democratising culture. "Street theatre and concerts in public spaces were rising in popularity at the time," says Piano. Inside the building, visitors had access to the Bibliothèque Publique d'Information – Paris's first free public library – the Musée National d'Art Moderne and the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/ Musique (IRCAM), dedicated to research of music and sound. Piano and Rogers' winning entry provoked consternation and fury when it was announced at a press conference: "The room was packed," remembers Piano. "Richard and I were standing in the middle of the room being heckled. We felt elated yet terrible at the same time," says the architect. "Some people were shouting, 'Why have you designed something so horrible?' 'Why are you are destroying Paris's historic centre?'" Although surprised to have won the contest, Genoa-born Piano grew up feeling architecture was his destiny – aged 18, he told his father he wanted to be an architect. However in conversation his manner is humble, not entitled. Born into a family of builders in Genoa, he loved watching his father's work take shape. Perhaps his childhood experience of seeing buildings materialise successfully made him feel that architecture is open to all possibilities. "Building is a beautiful gesture," he once told The Financial Times. "It's the opposite of destruction… especially when you are creating buildings for people because they are civically important." In 1981, Piano founded the Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW), with offices in Genoa and Paris, led today by 11 partners (in the spirit of a collective). In 1998, he won the Pritzker Architecture Prize. More like this:• The swinging 60s icon who revolutionised style• The star tidying guru who transformed our homes• How to transform your home with art The Plateau Beaubourg in central Paris – a stretch of wasteland occupied by a car park – was the site chosen for the new Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne (formerly housed in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris's haut-bourgeois 16th arrondissement). "It was a place waiting for something to happen," says Piano. A moment of change France's social and political climate at the time, still rebellious following the tumultuous events of May 1968, was conducive to the creation of a building as disruptive as the Centre Pompidou, acknowledges Piano: "In Britain, society was being revolutionised by [designer] Mary Quant and the Beatles. The same was happening in Paris." The Centre Pompidou was partly inspired by the ultra-pop architecture of experimental London-based architecture collective Archigram. "The idea that France should have a 'Maison de la Culture', bringing together art, cinema, music and literature in cities was first invented by André Malraux [novelist, art theorist and France's first Minister of Cultural Affairs]. Pompidou was very supportive, too. I really believe that major shifts in architecture are only possible if you have a good client. George's wife, Claude, too, was an excellent lady." Pompidou, like Claude, was passionate about contemporary art and design. In 1972, they invited Pierre Paulin, a designer known for his space-age era furniture, to create new interiors for the private apartment of the Elysée Palace, the French presidents' official residence. The results were radically modern – the walls of the living room, dining room and smoking room were lined to cocooning effect with wool and polyester panels that obscured the residence's neo-classical splendour. Walls were hung with paintings by Robert Delaunay and other modernist artists. One impetus behind these efforts to provide Paris with a prestigious museum was that France had lost its reputation as the world's pre-eminent centre of avant-garde art. "It is my passionate wish for Paris to have a cultural centre like the ones they've been creating in the US," Pompidou told Le Monde newspaper in 1972. "It will be both a museum and centre of creation, where the visual arts take up residence with music, film, books and audiovisual research." Initially, reactions to the Centre Pompidou, frequently compared to an alien spaceship, were often extremely negative. "Taxi drivers used to say to me: 'Regardez!' before launching into a tirade against the building. With so much hostility, I had to keep a low profile among strangers," says Piano. The building, derisively likened by many to an "oil refinery", was the target of countless lawsuits. "We were sued so often – once on the grounds that Prouvé wasn't a qualified architect," he recalls. The French press initially lambasted the building. "Paris has its own monster, just like the one in Loch Ness," scoffed Le Figaro. "One day Richard and I were outside the building, as yet unfinished. We saw a woman struggling with an umbrella that had turned inside out in the wind and Richard rushed over to help fix it. When he mentioned that he was one of the building's architects, she jokily mimicked hitting him with the umbrella as if to suggest he was a naughty scoundrel." Yet after the building's opening in 1977, Parisians soon began to appreciate the museum – now one of Paris's most visited public institutions, that ranks behind only the Louvre and Musée d'Orsay in terms of visitor numbers. It also inspires architects today. "The Centre Pompidou, radical on completion, has continued to influence the design of public buildings ever since," says Hugh Broughton, founder of London-based Hugh Broughton Architects, who finds qualities in it other than its famously high-tech idiom. "It's an amazingly brave, generous building whose large public space promotes congregation, street theatre and the highest quality people-watching. Its core concept – open-plan floor plates supported by peripheral structure and services – draws upon medieval principles of castle structures, and combines this with an Arts and Crafts approach that makes a virtue of construction as an aesthetic medium. The result is a building which is dynamic, inviting, egalitarian, transparent and has awesome views – all the best attributes of great architecture. It changed the way a whole generation of architects think about buildings – placing their users at centre stage." Piano is also known for harnessing light in his projects to ethereal effect, as is the case with the Shard, which can seem to disappear in certain light conditions due to its glass skin. Architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff has said of his works as a whole: "The serenity of Renzo Piano's best buildings can almost make you believe we live in a civilised world." For Piano, what is the main architectural legacy of the Pompidou Centre? "The building is proof that culture doesn't suffer from being more public. It's a place where people gather primarily. It brings together art, life and culture – not culture with a big C but culture with a small c. When it opened, it brought culture to all, and made the city a better place for it." -- For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
The Guardian
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso by Sue Roe review
'No woman leaves a man like me,' Pablo Picasso is supposed to have declared to Françoise Gilot, his partner and the mother of two of his children, in the spring of 1953. The couple had by this point been together for a decade, their first encounter having taken place in 1943 in a black market cafe in Paris (Picasso, who was then 61, had approached the 21-year-old Gilot bearing a bowl of cherries). But now he'd become involved with Jacqueline Roque, the woman with whom he'd go on to spend the final years of his life. What to do about this? Gilot would not confront him. Better simply to call his bluff. 'I am very secretive,' she said in an interview in 2016. 'I smile and I'm polite, but that doesn't mean that… I will do as I said I will do… He thought I would react like all his other women. That was a completely wrong opinion.' The following year, the question of her relationship with Picasso was resolved when she married a painter called Luc Simon. Gilot, clever and hard working, was an artist in her own right whose relationship to Picasso even in later life was vexed. In 1964, she published a brilliant, bestselling memoir of her time with him (he was enraged, and so was the French establishment on his behalf), but thereafter, she often disdained to talk of him. She preferred to discuss her work, which is held by, among other institutions, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. If Picasso's influence on her art was clear, she was adamant that it had made its mark before she met him (she had studied his pictures). Leaving him hadn't been liberating, she insisted, for the simple reason that she hadn't been a prisoner in the first place. Gilot appears on the cover of Sue Roe's new book, Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso, in a famous photograph by Robert Doisneau, and from the moment you look at it – her famous lover reclines on a divan in the background, wearing a Breton shirt – the feeling grows that there's something wrong here. She would surely have loathed this book, and not only because it defines all its subjects only in relation to Picasso; try as Roe might to insist that each of her women is equally worthy of attention, there's no getting away from the fact that this is not the case. Several books have been written about Gilot, and I'd be happy to read any of them (I recommend About Women, a collection of conversations between her and the American writer Lisa Alther). But about other of Picasso's lovers there is, I'm afraid, somewhat less to be said. The book comprises six biographical essays, though self-containment is tricky given that Picasso usually began his next relationship before he had ended his last (the book's structure isn't always fit for the time frames involved). It begins with Fernande Olivier, the artist's model who lived with him in Montmartre between 1905 and 1912, and who appears, in various guises, in many of the Rose Period portraits. She is succeeded by the Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova, and she, in turn, by the model Marie-Thérèse Walter. Next comes Dora Maar, the photographer and painter, to be followed by Gilot and Roque, a saleswoman in a pottery shop. After Gilot, Maar is the most interesting, not least for her influence on Picasso's Guernica (she first caught Picasso's attention in a cafe by peeling off her gloves and stabbing between her fingers with a penknife). Sometimes, there's light relief. The scene – possibly unreliable, since several different accounts of it exist – in which Walter and Maar physically fight as Picasso looks on is straight out of a film by François Ozon. But mostly – Gilot being the exception – Picasso leaves these women devastated. It's not only his restlessness and unthinking cruelty; while once they were living in Technicolor, now they're back in black and white. Roe tells her stories straightforwardly, though she can be both repetitive and a touch Mills & Boon ('We can only imagine the chemistry between the charismatic, seductive, black-eyed painter, who by all accounts exuded charisma even when standing still; and the poised, serious dancer…'). If this territory is new to you, the book won't be without interest. But as a feminist project, however well-intentioned, it misfires badly. Hidden Portraits: The Untold Stories of Six Women Who Loved Picasso by Sue Roe is published by Faber (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The Guardian
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘The colour of my skin didn't matter': exhibition shines light on black artists in postwar Paris
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. 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.' 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. 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. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion 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.
