Paul Bilhaud was a French playwright and librettist. An old friend of the author Alphonse Allais, he is remembered along his friend as a forerunner of minimalism with his painting Combat de nègres pendant la nuit ("Battle of Negroes during the night"), displayed for the first time in 1882, more than thirty years before the Black Square by Kazimir Malevich. It had been missing since that time until it was rediscovered in a private collection in 2017–2018. It has been classified as a National Treasure by the French state. Bilhaud was not the first to create an all-black artwork: for example, Robert Fludd published an image of "Darkness" in his 1617 book on the origin and structure of the cosmos; and Bertall published his black Vue de La Hogue (effet de nuit) in 1843. Inspired by Bilhaud, Alphonse Allais proposed other monochrome paintings, published in his Album primo-avrilesque in 1897.
