Josephine Baker  

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J’ai deux amours
mon pays et Paris

--"J'ai deux amours" (1930)


"Born in St Louis in 1906, Baker travelled to France as a dancer in La Revue Negre. According to biographer Lynn Haney, the show’s producer had been advised by the Cubist artist, Fernand Leger, to bring an all-black show to Paris. ‘Give them the Negroes,’ Leger told Andre Daven, after he had seen an exhibition of African sculpture at the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs. ‘Only the Negroes can excite Paris.’ " --Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes in a Real World (1999) by David Toop


"She made her entry entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather between her limbs; she was being carried upside down and doing the splits on the shoulder of a black giant. Midstage he paused, and with his long fingers holding her basket-wise around the waist, swung her in a slow cartwheel to the stage floor, where she stood. . . . She was an unforgettable female ebony statue. A scream of salutation spread through the theater. Whatever happened next was unimportant. The two specific elements had been established and were unforgettable-her magnificent dark body, a new model that to the French proved for the first time that black was beautiful, and the acute response of the white masculine public in the capital of hedonism of all Europe-Paris." --Paris Was Yesterday, 1925–1939 (1972) by Janet Flanner

Josephine Baker, photo by Lucien Waléry
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Josephine Baker, photo by Lucien Waléry

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Josephine Baker (1906 – 1975) was an American-born French dancer, singer and actress. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in her adopted France. She was the first black woman to star in a major motion picture, the 1927 silent film Siren of the Tropics.

During her early career, Baker was among the most celebrated performers to headline the revues of the Folies Bergère in Paris. Her performance in the revue Un vent de folie in 1927 caused a sensation in the city. Her costume, consisting of only a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace, became an iconic image and a symbol both of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties.

Baker was celebrated by artists and intellectuals of the era, who variously dubbed her the "Black Venus", the "Black Pearl", the "Bronze Venus", and the "Creole Goddess". Born in St. Louis, Missouri, she renounced her U.S. citizenship and became a French national after her marriage to French industrialist Jean Lion in 1937. She raised her children in France.

She aided the French Resistance during World War II and was named a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur by General Charles de Gaulle. Baker sang: "I have two loves, my country and Paris."

Baker refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States and is noted for her contributions to the civil rights movement. In 1968, she was offered unofficial leadership in the movement in the United States by Coretta Scott King, following Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. After thinking it over, Baker declined the offer out of concern for the welfare of her children.

On 30 November 2021, she was interred in the Panthéon in Paris, the first black woman to receive one of the highest honors in France. As her resting place remains in Monaco Cemetery, a cenotaph was installed in vault 13 of the crypt in the Panthéon.

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