There was no shortage of epithets for Josephine Baker, the St. Louis-born polymath who took Paris by storm when she arrived there in 1925, aged 19, to headline “La Revue Nègre,” a show of all-Black performers at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.
The French graphic designer Paul Colin said he’d never seen anyone move like her: “Part kangaroo, part prizefighter.
A woman made of rubber, a female Tarzan.” To the writer Colette, a rumored lover, she was “a most beautiful panther,” and to Ernest Hemingway, “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw.” Over the next decade, she was also called “Black Venus,” “Black Pearl” and “Creole Goddess.”It is the Baker of this era — doing her scantily clad “danse sauvage” — who still looms large in the cultural imagination.
She was an Art Deco icon who was inducted into France’s Panthéon in 2021 and honored by Beyoncé on her recent “Renaissance” tour.
A new exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin presents Baker in the round — not as an object of entertainment, but as an artist and an activist.
Persons:
Josephine Baker, Louis, ”, Paul Colin, he’d, Colette, Ernest Hemingway, “, Pearl ”, Baker, —, France’s, Beyoncé
Organizations:
France’s Panthéon, Neue
Locations:
Paris, Berlin