‘To represent blackness as beautiful was radical’: the

From ballet-dancing in New York to playing a Bond villain, Trinidad-born brothers Boscoe and Geoffrey Holder led extraordinary lives. But it’s as trailblazing painters of black portraits and nudes that they will be remembered

The first time I ever saw a black male nude was in a Boscoe Holder painting in a private collection in Trinidad. It was beautiful – and so brazen that I wondered whether it broke the country’s lingering Victorian-era indecency laws. I would later discover he had painted hundreds more, many for his eyes only, never intended to be shown in his lifetime.

From Saturday at Victoria Miro in London, many will be shown in a joint exhibition with his younger brother Geoffrey, whose similarly radiant, sensual paintings of black men and women reflect just how far ahead of their time the Holder brothers were. Born in Port of Spain, Boscoe in 1921 and Geoffrey in1930, to an inspired middle-class mother from Martinique and an upwardly mobile Bajan father, the siblings were nurtured in a milieu of what art historian Erica James calls “an incredible generation of Caribbean people”.