Summer 1998
Volume 24, Number 4

A young African American dancer named Josephine Baker and her act, La Revue Nègre, took Paris by storm in 1925. Their arrival was trumpeted by the bold red, black, and white posters of a young French artist and set designer, Paul Colin. Colin was a brilliant caricaturist who had a way with line. His drawings captured the spirited movements of that "wild dance," the Charleston, newly imported from the States, and the syncopated rhythms of a new art called jazz.

In 1927 Colin created Le Tumulte noir, 1 a portfolio of hand-colored lithographs issued in tribute to Josephine Baker and the other African American performers who had captivated the Parisian public during les années folles, those "crazy years" known in America as the Roaring Twenties. The vivid colors and vigorous lines of Colin's drawings bring to life the extraordinary talent of these musicians and dancers. Colin's dashing sketches also convey le tout-Paris's infatuation with all things black. No one is immune, from celebrities of stage and page to shopkeepers and cabdrivers. Music-hall stars Mistinguett and Maurice Chevalier Charleston frantically across the pages. A middle-aged bourgeoise dances until she drops like a limp cloth into an armchair; visions of an elegant black man she had seen earlier in a Montmartre nightclub dance in her head. The City of Light has fallen under the spell of black music and dance.

Le Tumulte noir is a visual recapitulation of and homage to the Jazz Age at its peak. Its generous pages, as large as broadsides, immortalize the fortuitous encounter of two rising young talents--Baker and Colin--and their ensuing collaboration. She loved to dance; he loved to draw her dancing. Both were very good at what they did.

The sheets of Le Tumulte noir also suggest the communal sigh of relief African Americans exhaled in France. Arriving in significant numbers on French soil during World War I, black American soldiers experienced for the first time a society that was not organized around the principles of antiblack racial segregation and discrimination. There, segregation was illegal. Hotels, restaurants, and theaters were open to all, regardless of race. African Americans could dance all night with, and make love to, French women and men, and no one even blinked. It was not that France was innocent of racial bias; after all, its colonial rule was predicated on the presumed superiority of the French, their language, and their culture over the people of their African and Caribbean possessions. Nevertheless, compared to America, France was a color-blind land of tolerance. On the streets of Paris, black Americans could go about their lives without fear of running into the humiliation of Jim Crow racism just around the corner. They could become famous, like la Joséphine, or they could function like ordinary citizens. Above all else, they could savor the freedom of feeling like human beings for the very first time.

1. A list of possible translations of the word tumulte includes: uproar, commotion, tumult, turmoil, hubbub, storm, hullabaloo, turbulence, frenzy, sensation, rage, brouhaha, and craze. Thus, the title Le Tumulte noir conveys the energizing excitement African art and African American music and dance injected into the French capital after World War I.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University, as well as director of Harvard's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research. Karen C. C. Dalton is the director and curator of the Image of the Black in Western Art Research Project and Photo Archive at Harvard University.