Mixing art with exotic culture.

The great War had receded into history and another, horrifying beyond comprehension waited in the wings, creating in Europe a climate of perceptual urgency unparalleled for centuries. Old class structures had been decimated and were being replaced in painful but exciting ways. Talented individuals who had been courageous and fortunate enough to endure, created and implemented dramatic changes in the syntax of art and design with such conviction and forcefulness that their collective influence has permeated the arts for most of this century.

Paris in particular was a focus of enchantment, a magic mirror: a reaffirmation of life as it was meant to be lived and those who could not be there longed in some way to capture the tiniest part of its reflection. It was said there was not a woman in the Western World, (and many in the East) who did not long to be "Dressed by Paris". The name of Maurice Chevalier was on everyone's lips and a sensational black American named Josephine Baker, wearing an almost non-existent costume of bananas, burst upon the stage of the Theatre de Champs Elysees.

The show was the Revue Négre, and Baker was the living embodiment of one of the new kinds of beauty already appearing in the works of the great artists and artisans as they discovered the exotic power of African art.