"Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen through Parisian Eyes" by Karen C. C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in Critical Inquiry (Summer 1998), Univ. of Chicago, 202 Wieboldt Hall, 1050 E. 59th St., Chicago, Ill. 60637.
Until African American dancer Josephine Baker and La Revue Nègre came to Paris in 1925, the only blacks that young French artist Paul Colin had ever seen were immigrant workers from Africa and the West Indies. Assigned to do a promotional poster for the troupe, he was astonished and captivated by the 19-year-old Baker’s frenetic performance. His striking red, white, and black poster—depicting her, along with a musician and a tap dancer, as "alert, spirited, with it"—launched his career as well as hers, write Dalton and Gates . . .
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