From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Black culture was very much in vogue in avant-garde Paris in the 1920s Années Folles as white artists celebrated it as a means of escaping bourgeois values. At the same time, an emphasis on the "primitive" often reduced blacks to racist stereotypes.

The word negrophilia is derived from the French negrophilie that literally means love of the negro. It was a term that avant-garde artists used amongst themselves to describe their passion for black culture. Negrophilia was a craze in 1920s Paris, when to collect African art, to listen to jazz and to dance the Charleston, the Lindy Hop or the Black Bottom, was a sign of being modern and fashionable. Sources of inspiration were inanimate African art objects (l'art nègre) that found their way into Paris as a result of colonial trade with Africa as well as live performances by African-Americans many of whom were ex-soldiers remaining in European cities after the First World War who turned to entertainment for a source of income. Perhaps the most popular revue and entertainer during this time was La Revue Negre (1925) starring Josephine Baker.

This fascination with black culture and a "primitivised" existence flourished in the aftermath of the First World War (1914–1918), when artists yearned for a simpler, idyllic lifestyle to counter modern life's mechanistic violence. Avant-garde artists recognised for their negrophilia interests were poet Guillaume Apollinaire, artists Tzara, Man Ray, Paul Colin and surrealists George Bataille and Michel Leiris (L'Afrique fantôme) and political activist Nancy Cunard.

See also

• Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (2000) by Petrine Archer-Straw.
• Michel Fabre's From Harlem to Paris (91),
• Tyler Stovall's Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (96).

See also

• American migration to Europe
• Nancy Cunard
• Paul Guillaume
• Man Ray
• Music of the African diaspora
• African art's influence on Western art
• Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s