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National Geographic
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- National Geographic
How Black culture has shaped Paris—and where to experience it
Creative Black minds and artisans have been present in Paris's renowned art and food scene since the 1920s. American writers like Langston Hughes and James Baldwin found a home in the city's bustling jazz cafes, and their future works have laid the foundation for Black American literature. In addition to literary legends, tens of thousands of families of African origin reside in Paris, specifically in the 18th arrondissement, where a resilient and thriving community exists. La Goutte d'Or (the drop of gold) or locally known as Little Africa, is a neighborhood that borders one of Paris's most popular cabarets, the Moulin Rouge. The Chateau Rouge, Gare Du Nord, Goutte D'Or, and Barbes neighborhoods are all metropolitan districts where people of African descent work, thrive, and live. History buffs in search of an immersive cultural experience in Paris can wander through these congested city blocks of Goutte D'Or, home to Parisian locals from North and West Africa. Busy African hair-braiding shops, produce markets, textile businesses, and art galleries will transport tourists, at least for a couple of hours, from Europe to the world's second-largest continent. Paris armorial bearings, which include the stylized boat and fleur-de-lis, are seen on metro bridges in the La Goutte d'Or district. Photograph by Jarry & Tripelon, Anzenberger/Redux Parisians head to the open-air Marché Dujean to pick up fresh spices, African seafood staples, and a variety of other food offerings, such as those found at this halal butcher's shop. Photograph by Jarry & Tripelon, Anzenberger/Redux The Pantheon's Josephine Baker tribute, Little Africa Paris Village, the Le Paris Noir walking tour, and more are informative ways that educate travelers about the history of the African diaspora, which has influenced the city's world-renowned artistic and cultural identity. Here's how you can experience it. (6 ways to experience the Paris of the Roaring '20s.) Take a tour of Little Africa Guided by a local expert, tourists can take a walking tour through Little Africa, an in-depth journey into the culture and history of the 18th arrondissement. 'French people don't feel comfortable talking about race,' says Kevi Donat, the tour operator and founder of Le Paris Noir. 'We use the word 'origins' here.' Donat yearned to create more spaces, like Le Paris Noir, to share the African diaspora culture and provide a way to help others explore the city's African origins. Since migrating from Martinique, the young Parisian has proudly called the city his home for over two decades. The engaging, two-hour Le Paris Noir walking tour honors the significant role that people of African descent played in Paris's larger community and their influence on its history, as described on a journey through areas near the Sorbonne, the Luxembourg Gardens, around Montmartre, and along the riverbanks of the Seine. Tourists learn about how Black Americans fled to Paris in the mid-1900s to find peace during rising racial prejudices and the pre-Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Travelers on this unique journey ascend Paris's hilliest roads near the Sacré-Cœur, where Donat would point out discreet cafés where Josephine Baker performed. Then, he would describe how the 369th Infantry, known as the Harlem Hellfighters (Black American WWI Soldiers), introduced jazz music to Europe and popularized jazz cafés in Paris, such as the now-defunct Café Tournon. Along the tour route, visitors will also see current and former sites, such as Les Deux Magots, where world-renowned jazz artist Miles Davis was once a patron and where authors Richard Wright and James Baldwin had passionate debates about the plight of being Black in America. Baldwin also worked on his first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain, in Café Flore at 172 Boulevard Saint-Germain. Journalist William Gardner and writer Ralph Ellison were known to frequent Café Tournon (now Le Tournon) , and author Langston Hughes dined at the now-defunct Le Grand Duc. Visitors may want to consider grabbing a bite to eat at La Palette (43 Rue de Seine), a favorite spot for painter Beauford Delaney. In the 9th Arrondissement, history buffs may spot the signed light post plaque dedicated to André Breton, a French writer and co-founder of the Surrealist movement, as well as an ally in the Négritude movement. This movement was a 1930s response to colonialism from French-speaking Black intellectuals aimed at reclaiming and celebrating Black identity and African cultural heritage. Le Paris Noir is a truly eye-opening way to uncover how Paris has always been a destination that has cultivated Black art, even through its complicated history, strife, and controversy. Visitors in search of sweets should consider a visit to La Rose de Tunis, one of several cake shops located throughout Paris, including the Little Africa location at 7 Boulevard Ornano. Photograph by Jarry & Tripelon, Anzenberger/Redux A woman passes by La Régulière, a bookstore, workshop, and café at 43 Rue Myrha in Paris's La Goutte d'Or neighborhood. Photograph by Michael Zumstein, Agence VU/Redux Art and jazz in Little Africa Immersive travelers who want to explore Paris's Little Africa neighborhood independently can visit Little Africa Village, a multidisciplinary space and cultural hub, located at 6 bis Rue des Gardes, where artists of African descent can support one another. The basement—the pièce de résistance—features an ongoing exhibition that showcases the perspectives of Black artists on living in Paris. For music lovers in Little Africa, the recommended Le Baiser Salé is a jazz club that fuses Afro-beats with French Jazz; meanwhile, La Gare, a renovated train station, hosts jazz late nights that usually feature African musicians. (Can Paris live up to the hype? Find out on a walking tour of its gilded past.) Taste the flavors of Africa in Paris Marché Dejean Little Africa is home to several markets that feature vendors selling spices such as piri piri and berbere. Located on Rue Dejean, Marché Dejean is an open-air market where stalls and local entrepreneurs sell a variety of produce, including okra, spinach, and seafood staples such as tilapia and barracuda. Many French chefs of African descent have transformed their home-cooked meals (usually served at a restaurant) into prepared dishes to sell at the market. Baraka Baraka, a spice shop located off Rue Robert Fleury, is an unexpected find far outside of Little Africa. A short walk from the Eiffel Tower, Chef Antompindi Cocagne, also known as Chef Anto, owns a brick-and-mortar shop that features authentic African herbs and pays homage to her hometown of Libreville, Gabon. She serves honey wines and ingredients imported from various regions of West Africa to educate the local community and tourists about the culinary history and offerings based rooted in her heritage. (Sights and bites: What to eat while touring Paris.) Kuti Chef Antoine Joss Lecocq's third restaurant, Kuti, is a stunning amalgamation of African street gastronomy and culinary tradition. The lively, canteen restaurant is painted with bold greens and oranges splashed across the exterior and is a good place for lunch. Entering the space feels like a warm hug; the intimate seating arrangements make enjoying Kuti's menu a communal experience. After his six-month journey across Cameroon, Lecocq returned to Paris with knowledge on how to prepare authentic pan-African fare. Kuti's delectable masa servings are probably their most famous dishes; a Nigerian pancake covered with either chicken or beef and plated, slathered with spicy, savory Baobob sauce, was seen on nearly every packed table. Their hearty vegetarian kondré stews and "Jungle Beat" dishes—crispy fried chicken atop of a bed of yellow rice, potatoes, spinach, and plantains, blanketed in Afro-spices—were my favorite plates. La Table Penja Chef Pierre Siewe offers his innovative, fine-dining interpretation of African fare with a French twist at La Table Penja. The Michelin-recognized restaurant opened in October 2024 and serves experimental, creative dishes such as thyme-roasted French sirloin paired with a fresh green Penja peppercorn sauce and rock octopus poached in court-bouillon, seared on a griddle. End your dinner with Siewe's sweet-and-spicy peppercorn ice cream—one of the most memorable, pleasant treats from my trip. (How to explore Paris from the seat of a bicycle.) Where to stay Tourists should consider staying at the centrally-located 25Hours Hotel Terminus Nord , situated in front of Gare Du Nord train station—also in a tourist hotspot. The eclectic hotel has a bike rental service and is popular for remote workers. Guests can travel outside of the busy 10th arrondissement with ease whenever they wish. However, guests who want to explore Paris's African diaspora history on their own should consider checking into the Le Royal Monceau Raffles Paris , a luxury hotel located just a short walk away from the Arc de Triomphe. Guests can opt to stay in the Ray Charles Suite, a room where the iconic African American jazz singer stayed. In his honor, the downstairs restaurant has nightly jazz soirees, and the monochromatic cigar room next door is a moody, crimson-red escape. Guests at both hotels can access the metro via nearby major train stations. They can take the 'B' or 'C' lines to Parisian landmarks, such as the Eiffel Tower, and more. Editor's pick: In addition to the Le Paris Noir walking tour, Walking The Spirit Tours also offers customized Paris vacation packages and guided tours that provide travelers with the authentic history and spirit of Paris based on founder Julia Browne's personal experiences living in France for 12 years. This trip was created with the support of the Paris Je t'Aime tourism office and Hotel 25H. Malik Peay is a culture writer from Los Angeles who uncovers distinctive art and food scenes of global destinations. Follow him on Instagram.
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.
Scotsman
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Scottish city named among ‘World's 10 best cities for culture' in 2025 by Time Out
In compiling this year's list, Time Out used two data sources. First, more than 18,500 people around the world were surveyed about culture in their city. Each city was then ranked according to how locals rated the quality and affordability of its culture scene. They were also asked about the cultural venues, events and festivals they love the most in their hometown. This data was then combined with scores from a panel of Time Out culture experts – Time Out's global network of city editors and culture experts – who voted for their favourite destinations. To ensure the list reflects cultural cities globally, only the highest-scoring cities for each country were included on the longlist. Grace Beard, Travel Editor at Time Out, said: 'Time Out's annual ranking of the world's best cities for culture is the definitive travel guide for those seeking a cultural city break where experiencing art in all its forms is affordable and accessible. Informed by the insights of 18,500 city-dwellers and a panel of Time Out experts, this list reflects the global destinations where art and culture isn't confined to mammoth museums and major arts venues (though there are plenty of those). 'Think pop-up festivals in unlikely locations, late-night museum parties, and a new class of creatives pushing the boundaries of performing arts. Each of these 20 cities has a lively programme of cultural events alongside legacy institutions for the arts – that's why they're the cultural capitals of today.' Take a look through our gallery to see the top 10 of Time Out's Best Cities for Culture in 2025 – and find the full list of 20 here: 1 . World's 10 best cities for culture in 2025 named Time Out has released its annual ranking of the World's Best Cities for Culture - and Edinburgh occupies a lofty position on the prestigious list. Photo: Time Out Photo Sales 2 . 1. Paris, France Time Out says: 2025 is a big year for Paris museums, from the reopening of the Grand Palais with a stunning exhibition from Dolce & Gabbana to the temporary closure of the Centre Pompidou, bowing out with Paris Noir, an ode to France's Black artists in the late twentieth century. In the city of light, its arts scene is embracing after-hours culture, with museums leaning into late-night events, including at David Hockney 25 and at the Nuit des Musées in May, where a number of museums will mix culture, music and light late into the night. Photo: Pixabay Photo Sales 3 . 2. Florence, Italy Time Out says: Florence's culture scene is a melting pot of Renaissance splendour and cutting-edge culture, including Tracey Emin's exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi, open-air movies at Villa Vardini and contemporary dance in a Roman amphitheatre. Florence received the second-highest number of votes from Time Out's arts and culture experts, while 73% of locals said the scene was top notch. Photo: Pixabay Photo Sales 4 . 3. Edinburgh, UK Time Out says: Best known to some for the world-renowned Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Edinburgh International Festival, this Scottish city is also home to brilliant museums, a rich literary history and electric live music. But, just when you think you've seen it all, something new comes along – like the buzzing Days Festival, back for a second year this May with its underground dance lineup. Europe's first museum of contemporary Palestinian art also opens its doors, while Chappell Roan lights up the Summer Sessions with her only UK gigs beyond Reading and Leeds. Photo: Pixabay Photo Sales Related topics: EdinburghCultureStaycationsScotland
The Independent
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Paris's Pompidou is closing – visit these six overlooked museums instead
The Centre Pompidou, Europe 's largest contemporary and modern art collection, is as fundamental to Paris sightseeing landmarks as the Louvre, Musée d'Orsay or even the Eiffel Tower. The building itself is part of the attraction; often compared to an oil refinery or a container ship, it shocked the public when it opened in 1977. I've always thought it looks more like a hamster cage, with thousands of daily visitors scuttling up the tube-like escalators on the outside of the museum to get one of the best views of Paris's rooftops from the third floor. From September, the Pompidou will be closing its doors for five years of renovations, leaving a gaping hole in many Paris getaways. The permanent collections have already closed, so those wishing to see Andy Warhol's Ten Lizes in the flesh will need to wait until 2030. If you're quick, you can still make it to the temporary exhibitions. 'Paris Noir', the city through the lens of the immigration which shaped it during the 20th century, is on until 30 June, and the works of Suzanne Valadon (an artist active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who frequently painted portraits of Montmartre cabaret dancers) is showing until 26 May. The final exhibition before closure will focus on contemporary photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (13 June–22 September). Originally known for portraits and gay scenes, his more recent works include astrophotography, abstract work and landscapes. Buy tickets in advance – the partial closure hasn't made the Pompidou any less popular. The temporary closure of an old favourite presents a new opportunity to discover Paris, and its often-overlooked smaller museums and galleries, outside the box – and there are more than 130 museums in the city, many eccentric and obscure. Cast your mind back to the hobbies of lost acquaintances from school and you'll probably find there's a museum dedicated to them. Stamp collecting? Check. Coin collecting? Check. Personally I had a morbid fascination with diseases – there's a museum that panders to my hobby. Fortunately, there's no museum dedicated to nose picking (yet). Here are six weird and wonderful museums to fill the Pompidou's hamster cage-shaped hole. The Funfair Museum (Musée des Arts Forains) A jump through time into the funfairs of early 20th-century Paris, this museum has you half expecting to see cartoon penguins break into dance and Dick Van Dyke on a carousel horse, like in Mary Poppins. Situated inside an old wine cellar, it's full of vintage merry-go-rounds, fairground games and puppet shows, and visitors can even have a go on the old rides. Guided visits are in French, but the guides generally make an effort to translate key parts into English. Opening Wednesdays, weekends and school holidays by prior reservation, no ticket office on site; The Sewers Museum (Musée des Égouts) Going down into the sewers of a capital city sounds pretty gross, but channel your inner Ratatouille and find there's something eerily beautiful about Paris's waste evacuation system. Take a guided tour to learn about the different animals that lived in Paris's sewers, many much less native to the city than rats, and the often unfortunate people that worked here. The stories are at once sordid and inspiring, from how an underground network of more than 1,600 miles was created, to the disease-ridden Paris of the 17th–19th centuries. Opening Tuesday–Sunday; The Wine Museum (M. Musée du Vin) First a 14th-century limestone quarry, next the cellars of a Franciscan Monastery during the 15th century, wine was produced and stored on the site of the modern-day Wine Museum as early as 600 years ago. Inside the vaults are exhibitions and models tracing the history of French winemaking and notable figures in viticulture, and for €4 extra, a glass of the 'wine of the month' is included with your ticket. Book the 'afterwork' package on Friday evenings for a drinks and food package, and a DJ set in the vaults. The European Photography Museum (Maison Européenne de la Photographie) With multiple temporary exhibitions that change most months, there's always something new to discover at the MEP. The permanent collection has photos from around the world – from the 1950s to the present day – from some of the world's best-known photographers, such as Irving Penn and Robert Frank. It scratches the itch of the Pompidou's now-closed photography gallery. Musée Cernuschi The 19th-century Italian banker and collectionist Henri Cernuschi spent two years travelling around Asia, collecting art, objects and curiosities now displayed in his mansion (the building is beautiful and worth a visit in its own right). There are almost 15,000 works, spanning some 5,000 years of history, with the largest collection being ancient Chinese art. The permanent collection is free, temporary exhibitions are chargeable. Open Tuesday–Sunday; The Plaster Cast Museum (Musée des Moulages) Morbidly fascinating, the Musée des Moulages – which is situated inside a hospital – has almost 5,000 plaster casts of different diseases, afflictions and injuries which were used to teach medical students in the absence of something more sophisticated. Created between 1867and 1958, the plaster casts detail the effects of everything from leprosy to syphilis in graphic detail. Through a modern lens, it looks like the dressing room on a film set – Game of Thrones' Hall of Faces perhaps. Hôpital Saint-Louis is still a working hospital; the museum and library is in a separate wing.
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.
