The Black Star was awarded a Guggenheim International Award in 1960, shortly after the death of its artist, Quebec Automatiste painter Paul-Émile Borduas (1905–1960). Long considered his masterpiece, the painting displays the synthesis of Borduas’s plastic language of his Parisian period: oppositions between strong contrasts (black and white) and more subtle ones (black and brown), and a calculated distribution of the black and brown spots on the white ground. The black spots never reach the periphery of the canvas but remain contained within the pictorial plane, thus ruling out a reversible reading (black on white or white on black). The suggestion of movement that emerges within the white ground by following the folds created by the palette knife are equally characteristic of Borduas’s work at this time.