23. From Homeless to Global Superstardom
Josephine Baker’s banana-skirted dance, which became famous in Paris as the Danse Sauvage, won her world renown. It went beyond a signature fashion statement, however, and revolutionized how dancers thought of movement itself. As one scholar put it: “Where European dancers showed the front, presenting the body as a unified line, Baker contrived to move different parts of her body to different rhythms. Most shocking to dance purists, she used her backside, shaking it, as one of her biographers says, as though it were an instrument“.
Josephine Baker also captured the hearts of the modernist art movement’s leaders, who congregated in Paris. Pablo Picasso jumped at the chance to paint her, seeking to capture her alluring beauty, and saying that she had “legs of paradise”. Ernest Hemingway called her “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw“. French director Jean Cocteau set out to make her a movie star, although her film success was limited to silent films in Europe.
