Read Online When Paris Went Dark by Ronald C. Rosbottom - Free Book Online

this was true.) Henri Matisse, almost as well known as Picasso, had also elected to remain in France during the war, residing in Nice and Vence, in southeastern France. That area was a bit safer, for the Italians controlled it, and they were much less restrictive than the Germans. He, too, ignored pleas from all over the world to emigrate. Matisse, however, was French, not Spanish; he was never considered a Jew or a leftist, as was Picasso. In his conversations with Picasso and his friends, Brassaï quotes an exchange he had with the poet Jacques Prévert. They were discussing Picasso in October of 1943:
    We should be grateful to [Picasso]. [Staying] was an act of courage. The man is not a hero. Just like anyone who has something to say or to defend. It’s easy to be a hero when you’re only risking your life. For his part, he could, and can still lose everything. Who knows what turn the war will take. Paris may be destroyed. He’s got a bad record with the Nazis, and could be interned,deported, taken hostage. Even his works—“degenerate” art and “Bolshevik” art—have already been condemned and could be burned at the stake.… And the more desperate Hitler and his acolytes become, the more dangerous, deadly, and destructive their rage may be. Can Picasso guess how they might react? He has assumed the risk. He is with us. Picasso is a fine guy. 8

    Josephine Baker. (© TopFoto / The Image Works)
    For the Germans, even the most ignorant of them, Paris was not just any city; it was an idea, a myth. By serendipity, creative planning, and massive amounts of public funding, the French capital had come to represent tolerance, liberty, and a crucible for the imagination. No one represented this image more than a young African American woman who came to Paris at the age of nineteen in 1925. Josephine Baker arrived fresh, seductive, and very brown to a jazz-obsessed city. Straightfrom Saint Louis, Missouri, she became an overnight sensation at the Casino de Paris and the Folies Bergère with her production
La Revue nègre.
Brilliantly playing upon the contradictory European fascination with and abhorrence of black sexuality, she adapted her style and performances to the newfound Parisian love for American popular music, imported by African American soldiers during the First World War. Her sensuous dancing elicited an almost hypnotic response from white male audiences all over Europe. By 1940, after the enormous success of her revue, the provocative Baker had become a transnational celebrity.
    Wrote one critic:
    With Miss Joséphine Baker everything seems to change. The rhythmic spurt comes from her, with her frenzied flutterings and reckless, dislocated movements. She seems to dictate to the spellbound drummer, to the saxophonist who leans lovingly towards her with pulsating language of the blues, [whose] insistent ear-splitting hammering is punctuated by the most unexpected syncopations. In mid-air, syllable for syllable, the jazz players catch hold of the fantastic monologue of this crazed body. The music is created by the dance. And what a dance!… This brief
pas de deux sauvage
in the finale reaches the heights with ferocious and superb bestiality. 9
    The
Revue nègre
offered other black bodies, often half nude (or more), sweating in exotic dances devised by Baker, who exploited the stereotypes that Europeans had about “primitive savages.” The posters that plastered Paris, and that made their way across Europe, reproduced all the stereotypes of Africanness: jutting buttocks, thick lips, wide eyes, shiny teeth, kinky hair. Seeing these joyful ads for the revue at the Music-hall des Champs-Élysées, our smile becomes embarrassed when we realize that the Nazis would use the same stereotypes for their attacks in the 1930s on “degenerate art.”
    Soon after their Parisian triumph, Baker’s producers realized that there was more money to be made throughout Europe, so an extensive tourwas planned. In 1926, her troupe