In the Roaring Twenties, Paris is seized by black fever
Special issue on Joséphine Baker
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Josephine Baker is the black star of the Roaring Twenties. In the collective representations that we keep from the time, it is often the only one of this color. Look for the spontaneous images that come to you from this time: a short dressed boy who dances the Charleston, a surrealist who plays exquisite corpse with an ex-Dadaist, painters from Montmartre migrating to Montparnasse to meet the American writers of the Lost Generation, sipping their vermouth on the terrace of La Coupole. Among this merry troop, many are the foreigners, but, with the exception of Madame “I have two loves”, all are white.
Truly ? Let’s look better on the photo, let’s open up the field. Joséphine, who has embarked on her black-bottom, is therefore black. The musicians of the frenzied orchestra who, behind her, give her. The “montparnos” painters, Italian, Russian, German and Romanian immigrants, are almost always European, it’s true. Both hold for nothing more beautiful than the statuettes or the masks of what is then called “black art”. And this evening, all these people, the Yankee writers, the rapists, the poets and their rich patrons will go to slaughter rue Blomet, in the 15e arrondissement,