21 Photo Promotional Cards for L'Exposition Coloniale Performances; Pernod Fils pavilion

Paris: Studio Lorelle, 1931. Very good. 21 small format black-and-white photographic cards (5 1/8" x 2 5/8") featuring portraits of Baker by photographer Lucien Lorelle (1894-1968). The cards promoted Baker's appearances at the Pernod Fils pavilion during the 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition, where she sold recordings and books to benefit colonial charities. Each card presents a different pose and costume, documenting the range of Baker's performance personae. Baker appears in an array of ensembles: elaborate feathered capes, her banana skirt costume, nautical-inspired skirts, and pearl necklaces, with several images featuring her topless. Other photographs capture her posed at a piano in a silk gown. The front of each card displays Baker's image alongside text adapting her recent hit song "J'ai deux amours" (I have two loves, my country and Paris), reimagined as: "JOSÉPHINE BAKER chante: J'ai deux amours... PARIS... ...PERNOD fils." The verso provides venue details, noting the pavilion's location at the edge of Lake Daumesnil, near the Indochinese Restaurant, and identifies Baker as "la Grande Vedette du CASINO DE PARIS." Minor handling wear consistent with period ephemeral advertising materials, one with trimmed borders; else near fine. Born Freda Josephine McDonald in St. Louis, Missouri, Joséphine Baker arrived in Paris in 1925 and within months became the city's most electrifying sensation. Her "danse sauvage" at the Folies Bergère (performed in little more than a girdle of artificial bananas) scandalized and mesmerized audiences in equal measure, transforming the twenty-one-year-old into Europe's highest-paid entertainer. She embodied the contradictions of her age: a Black expatriate who fled segregation only to become what scholars call "a floating signifier of cultural difference," initially designated "Queen of the Colonies" for the 1931 Colonial Exposition (a role she couldn't officially hold as a non-colonial subject), yet ultimately transcending these imposed identities through sheer force of talent and will.

The war years revealed another Baker entirely. Working clandestinely for the French Resistance, she earned the Croix de guerre, Médaille de la Résistance, and Légion d'honneur. She stood beside Martin Luther King Jr. as one of the only women to speak at the 1963 March on Washington. She created her "Rainbow Tribe" (twelve adopted children of diverse ethnicities) as a living rebuke to racism. In 2021, France interred her in the Panthéon, the first Black woman and first American-born woman to receive such honors, confirming what even a cursory knowledge of her life makes evident: she remains an enduring symbol of artistic innovation, political courage, and the transformative possibilities of performance.