When dancer Josephine Baker made her performance debut in Paris in 1926, she captivated audiences at the Folies Bergère with her sex appeal, energy, and charm. Performing in La Revue Nègre and later headlining in the film La Folie du Jour, Baker—gliding onto the stage in her signature banana skirt and with her neck and décolletage draped in pearls—took the city by storm.
Her admirers included famous writers and artists alike who professed their love for Baker through the monikers they bestowed upon her: “the New Black Pearl,” “the Creole Goddess of France,” “the Bronze Venus.” Their fixation with the entertainer, and her blackness, reverberated in famous quotes. Ernest Hemingway called her “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw,” while Pablo Picasso was infatuated with her “coffee skin, ebony eyes, legs of paradise, a smile to end all smiles.”
These expressions of admiration have defined and shaped Baker’s legacy, but what lies beneath the surface of her life is rarely broached beyond biographical footnote. Her persona was far more complex and nuanced than the two poles of primitivism and commodification suggest, and in recent years writers, artists, and historians have re-examined her life not only through the social constructs that defined her, but also through her subtle resistance to them.
A new exhibition, “Icon in Motion,” now on view at the Neue Gallery in Berlin, explores artwork inspired by Baker alongside the intersectional dynamics of the interwar era that shaped her activism. In the show, curators Klaus Biesenbach, Terri Francis, and Kandis Williams examine Baker as a modernist muse and her enduring influence on contemporary art. Instead of viewing her through the prisms of performance and aesthetics, the show sheds light on how the image of Baker has been cultivated, rendered, distorted, and preserved over time, and how that imagery both reflects the past and is being rearticulated in the present.
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Early Years
Image Credit: A. Schorr/ullstein bild via Getty Images. Baker’s path to stardom was a highly unlikely one: Born in 1906, she grew up impoverished in St. Louis, Missouri, performing in the streets as a child for spare change, exploited and abused as a housekeeper and a nanny as a preteen. At 11 years old she bore witness to the East St. Louis race riots of 1917, in which white mobs attacked and killed scores of Black residents. The horrific violence from this event traumatized her for decades.
“I can still see myself standing on the west bank of the Mississippi looking over into East St. Louis and watching the glow of the burning of Negro homes lighting the sky,” she remembered years later. “We children stood huddled together in bewilderment . . . frightened to death with the screams of the Negro families running across this bridge with nothing but what they had on their backs as their worldly belongings. . . . So with this vision I ran and ran and ran.”
Resolved to escape the violence and discrimination that permeated the Deep South and its environs during Jim Crow, Baker began performing as a teen, quickly rising in the ranks of the vaudeville and showgirl circuit and landing a role in a traveling rendition of Shuffle Along. When Baker secured a spot at the end of a chorus line in Chocolate Dandies on Broadway, she stole the show. Ultimately this led to her passage to Paris via the RMS Berengaria in 1925.
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Le Tumulte Noir
Image Credit: Walery/Getty Images. Baker was part of a Black exodus from the United States to Paris after World War I, joining Black artists and intellectuals who were seeking an escape from segregationist violence in the South and socially codified inequality and discrimination in the North. In France she found fulfillment among kindred spirits searching for redemption, liberation, and selfhood and creating new pathways to cultural freedom through an eager embrace of Eurocentric modernism.
The country was still reeling from the psychological effects of World War I. This prompted an intense desire among the French to reject outmoded historical, religious, and academic mores and to redefine the country’s identity. These social dynamics created a perfect storm not only for African Americans in pursuit of creative freedom in a new land, but also for the French, eager to embrace a new identity through artistic expression. The result: Le Tumulte Noir (“The Black Craze”), a period that defined the Jazz Age in Paris.
Baker arrived at the apex of this storm as a modernist muse, the personification of the freedom so deeply coveted by her newly adopted countrymen. However, France’s embrace of Baker was tacitly conditional. Her role was to be that of a bridge between gazes: one of primitivism, characterized through caricature, and the other of the cultural appropriation and commodification of the Black body. This dynamic became the dominant prism through which her legacy would come to be viewed.
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Fetishized Beauty
Image Credit: Copyright © George Hoyningen-Huene Estate Archives. Courtesy Neue Nationalgalerie. Baker’s influence on modernism is evidenced in the contemporaneous artworks created in her image. Alexander Calder rendered her in a series of wire sculpture mobiles in 1927. One 1929 sketch by Le Corbusier depicts Baker in a tender moment of slumber, a departure from the raucous, energetic illustrations of Baker by Paul Colin in his “Tumulte Noir” series. Echoes of this aesthetic recur in sensual, seductive photographs by George Hoyningen-Huene; his most iconic image depicts Baker as a Venus dripping in pearls behind a delicately draped veil.
Matisse pinned large cutouts onto one of the walls of his apartment in a piece inspired by Baker called La Negresse. Both Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier were so smitten with the performer that they designed homes for her, overtures that she declined. A postcard illustration by Italian Futurist Enrico Prampolini renders Baker using bold, geometric lines that exaggerate her musculature, particularly her rear end, an affectation that Jean-Paul Goude resurrected in his collaged photographic distortions of Grace Jones in 1978.
As iconic as they are, these images share a fetishized notion of Black beauty that situate Baker behind a veil of conspicuous invisibility. As writer Catherine Slessor observed, “Baker was, in effect, a cipher. Her life and opinions, beyond the role of exoticised fetish for powerful white men who were inclined to ‘cherchez la femme,’ barely registered.”
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Political Activism
Image Credit: Roosevelt H. Carter/Getty Images. In truth, Baker was much more than the sum of her aesthetic traits, though her achievements were, outside France, often relegated to the margins of her career. After fleeing Paris at the beginning of the Nazi occupation, she relocated to the south of France, where she hid Jewish refugees and Resistance fighters at her chateau. Later, under the guise of performing on tour, she smuggled to the Resistance information written in invisible ink on song sheets. “I was able to get into various towns and I would memorize everything and report it back to my superiors,” she recalled in a 1973 interview. “I was what they called an ‘honorable correspondent.’”
After the war, Baker was a staunch supporter of civil rights and was one of two women chosen to speak at the 1963 March on Washington, addressing the audience just minutes before Martin Luther King. In a letter she wrote to President John F. Kennedy in 1963 before the march, she wrote, “Let us forget once and for all their color, their religion, their continents from which they may have come. It is our duty to open the doors to true freedom for all Mankind in general.” She also famously observed, “Surely the day will come when color means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one’s soul; when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood.”
In France Baker’s legacy is sacrosanct. In 1961 she received two of France’s highest military honors, the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor, for her secret intelligence work in support of her adopted country. In November 2021, she was the first Black woman inducted into the national mausoleum at the French Pantheon, though some viewed the overdue distinction as a way of compensating for France’s own legacy of racism.
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Influence on Contemporary Art
Image Credit: Copyright © Simone Leigh. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York. “Icon in Motion” attempts to restore to Baker the visibility and personhood that she was denied during her life. It balances the narrative by shifting our gaze, presenting contemporary works by Simone Leigh, Faith Ringgold, Carrie Mae Weems, and others that expand the sphere of Baker’s influence.
In a seven-minute video essay titled Josephine Baker Watches Herself, Terri Francis offers textural meditations on Baker’s film imagery and interviews that contextualize her impact. The curators have also introduced critical voices, including that of Jane Nardal, whose writing became some of the philosophical underpinnings of the pan-Africanist Negritude movement of the 1930s. Celebrating the intellectual, and artistic expressions of Black liberation, Nardal examined deleterious notions of blackness, with Baker becoming a lightning rod for her criticism.
In a 1928 magazine article titled “Pantins Exotiques” (“Exotic Puppets”), Nardal examined the exotification of Black women vis-à-vis Baker. “Here it is that a woman of color leaps on stage with her shellacked hair and sparkling smile. She is certainly still dressed in feathers and banana leaves, but she brings to the Parisians the latest Broadway products (the Charleston, jazz, etc.). The transition between past and present, the soldering between virgin forests and modernism, is what American blacks have accomplished and rendered tangible. And the blasé artists and snobs find in them what they seek . . .”
Here Nardal begins to demonstrate that success in Europe was predicated on the commodification of Black art, dance, and jazz as tethered expressions of exoticism and primitivism. Through her scholarship, she illuminated the intersectional tensions that existed for Baker—and continue to exist for Black women who create significant cultural shifts within prevailing dominant narratives.
Baker herself would likely have relished the more holistic view of her life offered by shows like “Icon in Motion” and by the work of contemporary artists such as Barbara Chase-Ribaud, whose recent “Three Josephines” series of sculptures is dedicated to her memory. At the same time, they remind us that through re-situating events and people, we also broaden our capacity for understanding history—something else Baker might have appreciated.
