JOSEPHINE BAKER

BAKER, Josephine (1906-1975).

Vintage black and white publicity portrait of Josephine Baker in her famous banana skirt, 1930, warmly signed and inscribed by Baker: ‘To “Con Calliano,” With best wishes and sincere admiration from Josephine Baker, Jan 31/30.’ Writing on the 110th anniversary of her birth, Vogue described how Baker's 1926 "danse sauvage" in the notorious banana skirt ‘brilliantly manipulated the white male imagination’ and ‘radically redefined notions of race and gender through style and performance in a way that continues to echo throughout fashion and music today.’ Jerkins, '90 Years Later, the Radical Power of Josephine Baker’s Banana Skirt' for Vogue (3 June 2016). The image by H. Haas, Hamburg, 1930, vintage gelatin silver print, 232 x 175 mm.

[With:] a promotional fan from Club Chez Josephine Baker, c.1928, signed and dated in pencil on the unprinted side ‘Josephine Baker, August 17/28, Paris’. Stretched paper over wire frame, gold paper tape edging. Soon after first causing a sensation as the star of the Folies Bergère, Baker opened her own nightclub on Rue Fontaine in Montmartre in 1926. Biographer Jean-Claude Baker writes ‘Chez Josephine flourished, with Josephine dancing there from midnight till dawn “in front of a full room, before a brass band while high-society ladies play tennis with racquets and paper balls above champagne bottles, and between dances Josephine feeds her goat, Toutoute.”' A photograph from around this date showing Baker sharing a table at the club with writer Georges Simenon, his wife Tigy and her fiancée and agent Guiseppe Pepito Abatino, features one of these fans placed prominently on the table between them. Baker & Chase, 143.

[And:] a publicity postcard for the Theater des Westens illustrating Baker in costume for her Plantation dance, signed and inscribed in violet pencil ‘Souvenir Josephine Baker, Budapest, 1929’. The image by Stanislaus Julian Walery, c.1927, 139 x 91 mm.