“Joséphine Baker, a life of commitments”, a new exhibition to discover at the Resistance Museum
The departmental museum of resistance and deportation in Toulouse (Haute-Garonne) offers until October 29, 2022 an exhibition dedicated to Joséphine Baker, star artist and woman of commitments, who entered the Panthéon on November 30, 2021.
La marseillaise à pétanque 2022, 61st edition of the world
She is the first black woman to have entered the Pantheon and now rests alongside Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Marie Curie as a great personality who has marked the history of France.
Josephine Baker was an exceptional woman, with an exceptional destiny. A mixed-race and poor girl, born in Saint-Louis, Missouri in the United States, she suffered the full brunt of racial segregation. And decide to escape it by becoming a singer and dancer.
Uncertain beginnings that turn into success when the young woman performs in New York, in the first musical show designed and performed by blacks.
Her thirst for freedom growing ever greater, she arrived in Paris in 1925. It was a revelation for her. “It’s love at first sight“, explains Ingrid Leduc, director of the museums of the Haute-Garonne department and co-curator of the exhibition.For the first time, she has the right to exist as a person, she has the right to exist as a woman and no one points out to her that she is black. She has the same rights as everyone else, she can go anywhere and she discovers an artistic effervescence that she did not know, because it is the Paris of the 1930s, this Paris of incredible reviews, this Paris of the Folies Bergères“.
Very quickly, Joséphine Baker became the icon of Parisian nights. She fascinates as much as she scandalizes, her freedom is limitless, she claims loud and clear her place as a woman, her place as an artist…
Her love for France, which she has so often sung about, will be reinforced by the Second World War. On tour with the soldiers, she refuses defeat. And refuse to perform in Paris during the occupation.
In her castle of Milandes where she settles with her husband, gathers around her people eager to enter into resistance. Josephine Baker becomes an intelligence agent. She also goes on tour in the world to collect the money made available to the action of Free France. A great admirer of General de Gaulle, she maintained a correspondence with him all her life, as evidenced by the letters signed by her hand “your Gaullist sale” which can be read at the museum of resistance and deportation in Toulouse.
But when the war is over, his fighting does not stop. She is committed to civil rights in the United States, her country of origin where she is still not allowed to drink coffee alongside white people. She took part in the Martin Luther King march in Washington in 1963.
At the same time, Joséphine Baker is also committed to children. She adopts twelve, from all over the world, her rainbow tribe, as she calls it.
In 1961, she received, at the Milandes, the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre, for her commitment to the service of France. 60 years before entering the Pantheon.
It is the life of this exemplary woman, who continues to inspire, that the exhibition of the departmental museum of the resistance of Toulouse proposes to discover, with, in support, numerous documents and exceptional works ready for the occasion, in a beautiful museography.
“Joséphine Baker, a life of commitment” is on view until October 29, 2022. Several events will punctuate the duration of this temporary exhibition.