It opens with a double-page spread of a stage, red theatrical stage curtains pulled closed: the performance is about to begin. More "appropriateness": the book uses the framing device of a stage to tell the story of Josephine's life. And with just a white crescent for her smile and a few lines for her rapturously closed eyes, Robinson captures her ecstatic joy in dancing. They strutted, / Josephine shimmied instead"). Where the other figures are basically vertical, Josephine is all curved kinetic motion - hips swinging to the side, arms outstretched. This is pared-down, impressionistic painting - except that somehow artist Robinson makes Josephine Baker stand out so starkly from the others that you barely need to read the text ("The chorus kicked forward, / she kicked backward. Nobody has the correct number of fingers. On the spread where Josephine finally gets to join the chorus with the Dixie Steppers and immediately stands out from the crowd, all we see is four figures forefronted on a page of a rather neutral color - no background at all. The four figures - dancers in the chorus - are delineated about as simply as cartoons: circles for eyes, circles and lines for mouths and noses. I'm not exactly sure I'm using it correctly, but here is what I mean.
The saturated colors (a rainbow of them - and again, how appropriate) the visible brushstrokes - also brilliantly appropriate for a book about such an outsized and charismatic personality. Every adjective I can think of for the book's art - vivid, bold, electric essential full of verve and pizzazz and razzmatazz - applies to the book's subject as well. So we can get that major, crucial criterion "appropriateness of style of illustration to the story, theme or concept" out of the way right off the bat this book will be hard to beat in that category.
The subtitle of Patricia Hruby Powell (author) and Christian Robinson (illustrator)'s fabulous picture-book biography of the early-twentieth-century African American dancer and iconoclast is "The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker" - and the book is truly as dazzling as its subject.
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