A Josephine Baker show at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. When it was announced for 2024, I was excited. Now I have seen it, I'm less happy and even a bit disappointed. Josephine Baker. Icon in Motion is not an art exhibition but a historical exhibition, dedicated to Baker's life. In a rather small space of the museum (literally in a corner) the walls are plastered from bottom to ceiling with images and text. One gets to know much about Baker's persona, her activism, even her kids. Her performance art is there too, but cluttered by history. It might be that the Neue Nationalgalerie plans on doing a series of historical exhibitions in that corner space, dedicated to the lives of modern artists. The life of Marcel Duchamp could be on next, but I doubt it.
What I had wished for, is the following: a proper art exhibition with a few big projections of Baker's performances like ‘Danse Sauvage’ in which she played with the tropes of racism in European culture. Her song “Si J’étais Blanche” (If I were White), from 1932 – which Baker performed in “white face”, wearing a blonde wig – could fill a whole space by itself. At the start of the exhibition, I propose a photo of Baker where she crisscrosses her eyes as she used to do when being photographed - a performance on its own.
Also, rather than just exhibiting some avant-garde (male, obviously) artists who painted and photographed Baker, there could also be work that truly interacted with what Baker was doing. Take, for instance, the Berlin artist Valeska Gert. In a book by Fred Hildenbrandt from 1928, Gert is shown dancing "Negertanz" in a black suit. Her head, hands and feet stay uncovered so it is clear that a white person is dancing. Gert was aware that in Baker's work, the joke really was on white people, and that included the artistic avant-garde.
