"Modern Primitive: Parody, Ambivalence, and Paradox in Paul Colin's Le Tumulte Noir"

• Main Author: Monroe, Julia Boyette
• Format: Others
• Published: VCU Scholars Compass 2014
• Subjects: Paul Colin; Le Tumulte Noir; Lithographs; Jazz Age Paris; Josephine Baker; Arts and Humanities
• Online Access: http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/624; http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1623&context=etd

This thesis analyzes Paul Colin’s 1927 portfolio of lithographs entitled Le Tumulte Noir as an expression of the simultaneously progressive, celebratory, racist, and colonialist ideas about jazz music, dance, and blackness in Paris during the 1920s. Because the portfolio often demonstrates conflicting tropes for representing people of African American descent, for example minstrelsy vs. New Negro imagery, this thesis uses several methods for investigating the ambivalence of the artwork and the culture in which it was produced. The double-coding of meaning presented by parody, calligrams, and self-division are central to this analysis of Colin’s representations of the “Charlestonesque epidemic” in Jazz Age Paris. Images from Le Tumulte Noir are nearly ubiquitous in literature on the Parisian Jazz Age, and this thesis contextualizes the form, content, and iconography of the lithographs in light of the social and artistic history of 1920s Paris.