Parisian artist Paul Colins was arguably the best jazz poster artist ever, and this (above) is his most famous poster.
Like everybody else in Paris in 1925 he was bowled over by the Revue Negre, which featured Josephine Baker dancing in a banana outfit. The revue also introduced 'The Charleston" to France. Audiences went nuts!
The famous bananas (above).
Baker dancing to "Hot Hot Hottentot!"
Colin couldn't fit all his impressions into posters so he did a series of lithographs for a book called "Le Tumulte Noir," which is where most of these pictures are from. Baker sat for him several times.
The odd angles of the poses struck by the dancers wowed everybody...
...as did the frank sexuality.
In Colin's words, Baker was "part boxer kangaroo, part rubber woman, part female Tarzan." Baker was one of the all-time great free-form dancers.
Here's (above) the kind of thing Colins did when he wasn't drawing jazz artists.
Are some of these pictures racist? I honestly don't know. When they're done as well as these are, the whole question gets hard to focus on. You could argue that the red minstrel lips are a racial stereotype, on the other hand the artist clearly admires many of the people he depicts, even when he makes fun of them.
