That old black magic
Patrick Skene Catling
Ater the prolonged carnage of the first world war, Western civilisation seem- ing to have failed, some influential Euro- pean artists rejected what they saw as corrupt, effete tradition and turned to the apparent innocence and vitality of the primitive. In fact, a few had already embraced l'art negre before the war. There are recognisable adaptations of African masks in 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon', which Picasso painted in 1907. The pio- neers also included Braque, Vlaminck and Brancusi. Later, everybody wanted to get in on the act. In Paris in the 1920s, not only in the galleries, suddenly black was chic.
Dr Petrine Archer-Straw, a black Jamaican born in Birmingham 43 years ago, began teaching courses in primitivism in modem art at the Courtauld Institute in 1994. She earned her doctorate there with a thesis, now published as an elegant, elo- quent, profusely illustrated book, on Parisians' (temporary) love of all aspects of negritude.
Wegrophilia,' she writes, 'is about how the white avant-garde in Paris responded to black people during the 1920s, when inter- est in black culture became highly fashion- able and a sign of being modern.' It is easy to imagine how this subject might have aroused the passionate indignation and bit- ter irony of James Baldwin, but Archer- Straw keeps her academic cool. As objective as humanly possible, her work in the main is emotively scathing only by implication. The anger detectable between the lines deserves sympathy.
As she promises in an introduction of admirable specificity, she scrutinises adver- tisements, painting, sculpture, photogra- phy, popular music, dance and theatre, literature, journalism, furniture design, fashion and objets d'art, `to see how black forms were appropriated, adapted and vul- garised by whites'. Only that 'vulgarised' explicitly expresses her protest.
While the severity of Fang masks from Gabon could inspire transmutation into the charming images of a painter such as Modigliani, the arrival in Paris of live African-Americans had a bizarre, even grotesque effect on European imagination. Paul Colin, in a print portfolio entitled Le Tumulte noir, reacted typically to black American music-hall performers in La Revue negre at the Theatre des Champs- Elysées when he wrote, 'I sat gaping at the stage. The contortions and cries, their sporty, perky breasts and buttocks, the bril- liant coloured cottons, the Charleston, were all brand new in Europe.'
Negroes in show business in the USA inevitably made concessions to white audi- ences. It was commercially advantageous to emphasise what Archer-Straw calls their `Africanicity'. For example, there were occasions when Negro dancers actually blacked their faces to resemble blacked-up white minstrels: blacks imitated whites imi- tating blacks. Even the great Duke Elling- ton had Bubber Miley and Tricky Sam Nanton growl through plunger mutes to give brass a so-called 'jungle style' for the An elegant Josephine in banana skirt' by Paul Colin, from Le Tumulte noir white patrons of Harlem's Cotton Club. When Negro musicians took jazz to Paris the French found its blackness exotically exciting. Colin portrayed the Negro as `childlike and playful', Archer-Straw points out, 'while simultaneously being animal- like and sexual'. She lists an association of ideas: 'animal, animal skin, savage, human savage, savage animal, black man, black savage animal.'
White high society seemed higher in the company of blacks willing to humour them. Nancy Cunard did not end her ostentatious affair with Henry Crowder, a black musi- cian, when her family threatened to cut her off from the family fortune. Difference is more thrilling than sameness. In Paris, for a while, hints of miscegenation were in vogue.
The negrophilia craze provoked much crude graphic commentary, in music-hall posters and comic magazines. As early as 1900, Le Rire published a drawing of a white woman in her boudoir grabbing the lapel of an eye-rolling golliwog-man. `Chochotte,' reads the caption, 'takes her Chocolat in bed.' In 1923 Sem drew a ball- room scene slightly more realistically, except that the black men dancing with white women have faces like caricatures of gorillas.
In Paris in the 1920s, Archer-Straw observes, 'the difference between the negro's and the negrophile's acting is that one is about material survival, while the other is about the survival of art, poetry and fantasy'. The aspirations were opposed yet complementary and, in some ways, mutually beneficial.
The queen, 'the black Venus', the verita- ble apotheosis of negrophile fantasy, was a young song-and-dance vaudeville per- former from St Louis, Josephine Baker. Archer-Straw properly allots her a domi- nant place in the book, for she personifies the whole thesis. For her first French pub- licity photograph, racially self-parodying, Josephine emphasised her callipygean appeal in a Hottentot pose, arching her back and thrusting out what Anita Loos called 'her cheeky bum'. Very soon, however, Josephine was hailed as the most glamorous star in Paris, the richest black woman in the world.
The Josephine Baker Story richly satisfies a desire to learn more about this phe- nomenon of interracial entertainment and enlightenment. How she rose from poverty to world-wide acclaim is a melodramatic epic that Wood's judicious sense of balance saves from the danger of schmaltz. This is an excellent biography.
Born in 1906, Josephine sailed from New York to France in 1925 — perfect timing for the best possible reception, as Archer- Straw has demonstrated. Josephine took a rabbit's foot with her. It worked. Dancing naked except for jewellery and a girdle of bananas gained instant notoriety and star- dom. Her singing improved gradually. Off- stage she attracted admiring attention even when fully dressed. Paris's foremost cou- turiers clamoured for the privilege of giving her clothes. Her luxurious apartment was a private menagerie, at various times con- taining a cheetah, a boa constrictor, a pig and monkeys.
Josephine became Josephine with an acute accent. She became a French citizen in 1937. France decorated her for service in the Resistance. After the war, she lived in a château with a dozen adopted children of all available skin colours. She called them her 'Rainbow Tribe'. She took part in the civil rights march on Washington. Every- one knew her and she knew everyone. When caring for her adopted family caused financial distress, she telephoned Giscard d'Estaing, then the secretary of the trea- sury, and informed him that she wouldn't be paying any more income tax. Needing a car, she wrote to Gianni Agnelli, the presi- dent of Fiat. 'Send me one,' she requested. He did. After eviction from the château, she was able to move into a house on the Riviera arranged for by her friend Princess Grace of Monaco. Sometimes blacks and whites get along just fine.
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