Josephine Baker had so many lives that each one was more wonderful than the last. Born in 1906 in the United States in poverty and racial segregation, she became the first black artist to succeed in Europe as a singer, dancer and actress. She was also a member of the French resistance against the Nazi invader and an African American civil rights activist in her native country. Upon her death in Paris in 1975, financially ruined, she left twelve adopted children of different countries, religions and colors, with whom she sought to transmit a message of universal brotherhood.
In November 2021, almost half a century after her death, Josephine Baker entered the pantheon of the great figures of France with a symbolic burial, being the first black woman – and the sixth woman – to be honored in the Parisian mausoleum.
Her life and work, her political and social commitment, and her powerful personality are now displayed in an exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin with the title Josephine Baker. Icon in Motion, recently opened and will be open until April 28. The exhibition begins with the impact that that young, half-naked black dancer, dressed in a short skirt made of fabric bananas, caused in Paris and Berlin in the 1920s.
Kandis Williams, an American artist and writer involved in putting together the exhibition, herself an African American like Baker, points out the racist stereotypes of the banana dance. “It is sometimes painful to understand her success, because Josephine Baker often achieved great success by using in her performances precisely the exotic and racist clichés that white audiences expected of her as a black artist; That’s why sometimes it was a moving caricature.” In the exhibition, apart from photographs and fragments of her films and her performances, works by Alexander Calder, Le Corbusier and Henri Matisse inspired by her are exhibited.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, as Freda Josephine McDonald, she endured childhood hardships, experienced racial violence, and was married twice as a teenager. She kept the surname of her second husband, Baker, which she already employed professionally. As such, she performed at a very young age in New York as a backup singer in vaudeville shows with an abundance of jazz and Charleston. Even then she was bisexual and throughout her life she had relationships with men and women.
In 1925 he made the leap to Paris, where he triumphed with his show La Revue Nègre, and became a star with his permissive, sensual, exotic dances full of colonial prejudices very much to the taste of interwar Europe. In France she filmed four films. She was 19 years old and she also performed in Berlin, where she was applauded and feted, but just ten years after the arrival of the Nazis to power she was ostracized in the theaters of Germany.
When Hitler invaded France, she – who had French nationality since 1937 through marriage to the French industrialist Jean Lion, her third husband – joined the resistance and served as a spy. She was installed in North Africa, she camouflaged secret information for the French Government in exile and for the allies in her scores, she sang for the soldiers and became a second lieutenant in the Air Force. For this reason she received the Medal of the Resistance in 1946 and in 1957 General Charles de Gaulle decorated her with the Legion of Honor.
But when he traveled to the United States, the star was rejected in hotels because racial segregation existed by law. Outraged, she refused to perform in theaters that did not allow access to black audiences. On August 28, 1963, at the massive demonstration in Washington for the civil rights of blacks in which Martin Luther King delivered his famous I have a dream speech, Josephine Baker also took the floor, dressed in her military uniform, his decorations and his broad smile.
With her fourth husband, the composer Jo Bouillon, after the war, she founded a family of adopted children from different origins – which she called the rainbow tribe – at the castle Les Milandes, in the southwest of France, an expensive accommodation and tourist complex in the one who organized anti-racist and anti-imperialist conferences.
Despite their good intentions, the multicolored family did not always work out. The castle swallowed up her resources and she finally lost it in 1969, already divorced from Bouillon. It was then that an old friend from show business, Grace Kelly, then already princess of Monaco, welcomed her into a house in the Principality. She is buried there, and that is why in the Paris pantheon her coffin contains soil from her three countries: the United States, France and Monaco.
“In his actions as a resister during the war and as an activist for equality he was more than brave; She was influential,” says Klaus Biesenbach, director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, who stressed that this Mies van der Rohe building where 20th-century painting and sculpture is exhibited is the perfect place for an exhibition on Josephine Baker. “She was an author, a creator, and you have to see it beyond the images of her work; “You have to see her as her own author, an artist who was the author of herself.”
