Signed in stone, upper right
This vintage Au Bal Negre poster is one of the most famous posters of the 1920’s. It was created to promote a show on 12 February 1927 performed by Josephine Baker and her dance partner Joe Alex. The Au Bal Negré poster was created by the French artist Andres Charles Caron and it focuses on Baker performing one of her exotic, erotic, exuberant dances wearing nothing but a short green grass skirt. So, short even her dance partner pictured in the bottom right-hand corner raises a broad smile as the dancer swiftly moves across the stage against a chequerboard background.

The Bal Negre was an extremely popular West Indian Parisian dancing, cabaret, and jazz club during the heyday of the Roaring Twenties. Perhaps the club’s most famous artist at the Bal, was the American-born dancer and singer, Josephine Baker. In 1925, at the peak of France’s obsession with American jazz and all things exotic, Baker travelled to Paris and performed in La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. She made an immediate impression on French audiences when she performed the Danse Sauvage, in which she wore only a feather skirt. Baker became wildly popular in France, soon becoming one of Europe’s most celebrated and highest-paid performers of the 1920s.