Josephine Baker, Au Bal Negré poster – Caron – 1927.
This vintage Au Bal Negré poster, or Black Ball poster is one of the most famous posters of the 1920’s. It was created to promote a show performed by Josephine Baker and her dance partner Joe Alex at the Bal Negré. The poster was created by the artist Andres Charles Caron and shows Baker performing one of her exotic, erotic, exuberant dances.
The Bal Negre was an extremely popular West Indian Parisian dancing, cabaret and jazz club during the heyday of the Roaring Twenties. In fact, it was the most popular Antillean dancing nightspot in Paris for decades. Offically the venue was known as either Le Bal Blomet, after the name it is situated on, or Le Bal Colonnial in reference to the music and clientele of the venue from the French Caribbean. However, it was commonly referred to as LeBal Negré.
In 1924, the magnificently named Jean Rézard des Wouves, was a candidate for the Antillais delegation, setting up his campaign headquarters in an old farmhouse at 33 rue Blomet, near Montparnasse. The former 19th century farmhouse had been converted into a wine merchant then a cabaret. Originally from Martinique Rézarddes Wouves, founded the nightclub and a jazz band to attract a crowd for his political meetings. According to the Le Bal Blomet website Rézard was a better musician than speaker, “banjos, horns, and drums” provided the sounds that moved the crowd, and a dance called the biguine ruled the day. Wikipedia describes the beguine as a dance and music form, similar to a slow rhumba. It was popular in the 1920s and 30s. The sound came from the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, where, in the local Creole language, beke or begue means a white male while beguine is the female form.
In his biography, ‘La biguine de l’Oncle Ben’s ‘, Ernest Léardée a violin and clarinet player and future king of beguine music, succeeded Lézard to preside over the the Bal. In Léardée’s words, ‘This period probably was the craziest that I have lived. That ball was the hot spot of the capital… And not a single foreigner would leave Paris without having spent at least one night in this unusual place.’ The venue was popular with tourists who according to Léardée, ‘had become so famous in Paris that we only had to tell a taxi driver ’33…’ for him to add ‘…rue Blomet.’
At first, the club’s clientele consisted of French Carribeans and soon African Americans, such as the poet and writer Countee Cullen became frequent visitors to dance hall. Inevitably, Le Bal Negré began to attract artists, surrealists, painters and American expats. The almost endless list of clientele includes; Jean-Paul Satre, Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Maurice Chevalier, Mistinguett, Foujita, Man Ray, Henry Miller, Pablo Picasso, Robert Desnos, Joan Miro, André Masson, Francis Picabia, Jules Pascin, Moise Kisling, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Boris Vian, Albert Camus, Jacques Prévert, Mouloudji and many of the world’s high society would visit the Bal for an evening of fun.
Perhaps the club’s most famous artist at the Bal, was the American-born dancer and singer, Josephine Baker. In 1925, at the peak of France’s obsession with American jazz and all things exotic, Baker travelled to Paris and performed in La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. She made an immediate impression on French audiences when she performed the Danse Sauvage, in which she wore only a feather skirt. Baker became wildly popular in France, soon becoming one of Europe’s most celebrated and highest-paid performers of the 1920s. She achieved star billing at the Folies-Bergere where she created a sensation by dancing seminude in a G-string ornamented with bananas. She also popularised the dance the Biguine when learned at Le Bal, by she performing the dance in Paris Qui Remue at the Casino de Paris in 1931. Josephine made her film debut in 1927 in the film Siren of the and sang professionally for the first time in 1930. She made her screen debut as a singer four years later in Zouzou, and made several more films until 1955. Josephine Baker was the world’s first black superstar.
Being one of the world’s most feted performers with a career covering singing, dancing and acting wasn’t enough for this remarkable woman. September 1939, during World War II, when France declared war on Germany in response to the invasion of Poland, Baker was recruited by a French military intelligence agency as a spy!
According to Wikipedia, Baker collected what information she could about German troop locations from officials she met at parties. She socialised at gatherings at places such as embassies and ministries, charming people while secretly gathering information. Her café-society fame enabled her to rub shoulders with those in the know, from high-ranking Japanese officials to Italian bureaucrats, and to report what she heard. She attended parties and gathered information at the Italian embassy without raising suspicion. She carried information for transmission to England, about airfields, harbors, and German troop concentrations in the West of France. Notes were written in invisible ink on Baker’s sheet music. After the war, Baker received the Croix de guerre and the Rosette de la Résistance. She was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur by General Charles de Gaulle.
It was at this time Baker started to date the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.
During the 1950s, Baker supported the Civil Rights Movement. She would give talks on “France, North Africa and the Equality of the Races in France.” She wrote articles about segregation in the United States. She refused to perform for segregated audiences in America, even turning down $10,000 for a show by a Miami club. After this incident, she began receiving threatening phone calls from people claiming to be from the Ku Klux Klan but said publicly that she was not afraid of them. In 1951, Baker made charges of racism against Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club in Manhattan, where she had been refused service.
As the decorated war hero who was bolstered by the racial equality she experienced in Europe, Baker became increasingly regarded as controversial; some organisations even began to shun her, fearing that her outspokenness would hurt their cause.
In 1963, she spoke at the March on Washington at the side of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Baker was the only official female speaker. In her speech, one of the things Baker said: ‘I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world ‘
After King’s assassination, his widow Coretta Scott King approached Baker in the Netherlands to ask if she would take her husband’s place as leader of the Civil Rights Movement. After many days of thinking it over, Baker declined, saying her children were “too young to lose their mother.
Which brings us neatly to her twelve, yes 12 children.
During Baker’s work with the Civil Rights Movement, she began adopting children, forming a family she often referred to as “The Rainbow Tribe”. Baker wanted to prove that “children of different ethnicities and religions could still be brothers.” She often took the children with her cross-country, and when they were at Chateau des Milades, she arranged tours so visitors could walk the grounds and see how natural and happy the children in “The Rainbow Tribe” were.
At age 68, Josephine Baker put on a final performance in Paris—a medley of routines from her 50-year career. A few days later, she was found lying in her bed in a coma, surrounded by newspaper clippings of raving reviews of her performances. She had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Josephine was taken to the hospital, where she died on April 12, 1975.
Josephine Baker was a black, bisexual, exotic dancer turned spy. She helped defeat the Nazi’s, mothered twelve children, and fought for America’s civil right movement. What a remarkable woman.
Our posters are carefully and professionally created from vintage originals. Whilst great care is taken in the production of these posters, we also try to maintain a vintage feel, so there may be small imperfections, fold marks, scuffs, tears or marks that were part of the original poster master. If these do appear they should be visible on the larger views of the item on this listing. The originals of many of the posters we offer can cost many thousands of pounds, so whilst these posters look great, especially framed and mounted on a wall, they are intended as a fun, affordable reproductions and not intended fine art prints.
The 50x70cm version has been specially produced to be used in conjunction with Ikea’s 50x70cm Ribba picture frame which currently retails for around £15. So you can bag a bargain of print and frame for a great price.
