page_title: Donyale Luna
section_title: Artistry
hierarchical_section_title: Donyale Luna / Artistry
caption_attribution_description: Svenska: Reklamaffisch för Josephine Bakers svenska gästspel på Auditorium i Stockholm, troligtvis 1938.
context_page_description: Peggy Anne Donyale Aragonea Peugot Luna, better known as Donyale Luna, was an American supermodel and actress who gained popularity in Western Europe during the late 1960s, generally cited as “the first black supermodel”, Luna was the first African American model to appear on the cover of the British edition of Vogue, in March 1966. She entered modeling in a period which favoured 'white passing models' and has been described as 'the first black model who really began to change things; to enable more diverse beauty paradigms to break through.' She is known to have been a covergirl 11 times between 1965 - 1975.
  She appeared in several underground films like the screen tests of Andy Warhol, and had roles in Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo?, and most notably as Enotea in the 1969 Federico Fellini film Fellini Satyricon as well as Otto Preminger's Skidoo in the role of 'God's Mistress'.
context_section_description: Luna was known to be a muse of Salvador Dalí, and acted in many of the ways Dali did in accord with the philosophy of Surrealism. The American photographer William Claxton introduced Luna to Dalí when he met her in Catalonian village of Cadaqués, becoming Dali's lifelong muse whom he would refer to as 'the reincarnation of Nefertiti'. Artworks show how she would stand on a half-submerged piano which Dali has submerged himself for her to stand on, Claxton shooting 'Dali drawing impromptu traceries on Luna's body' (a line art piece on a cream dress) whilst she wore it or emerging from a human-sized egg full of red paint which made into an 1 hour long surrealist film being "a sciptless series of happenings, all centred on images of birth and creativity" in plastic costumes designed by Paco Rabanne. She could be found 'lying on a bed of fresh fish' in Dali's home. She was also known to carry around a $1 million check according to the supermodel Pat Cleveland, 'a legitimate cheque from her model agency' which she never took out and would try to pay with for a single meal, or her 'entourage of boys who followed her everywhere' behind her in file, and because 'she'd never sat in chairs, she'd always lounge' whilst her entourage would lay at her feet and with her penchant for going barefoot everywhere, Luna became known as an eccentric.
  The eccentric character of Donyale Luna can be seen as both a hyperbolic alter-ego and an extension of a fake it until you make it persona which Luna may have thought of as a 'metamorphosis'. Luna used camp to give off a larger than life character, using hairpieces, lengthened eyelashes, and 'a collection of blue, green, yellow, purple and orange [coloured contacts] ... which she changed like underwear' to play fast and loose with defined boundaries she may have had as Peggy-Ann. She would both employ others and use her own designs for her clothes, experimenting with bindi's on her third eye, and often wearing loose-fitting or flowing garments. These two (Peggy-Ann and Donyale) were succinctly distinct however, she stated of her photographs: 'If I had seen something like me in a magazine as a child, I would have died laughing, or been scared ... I find my own photographs weird, terribly sophisticated and different from anything else".
  The alter ego of Donyale Luna was created in what Freeman termed future visioning, a New Age approach culminating when she completed attended Central High Theater in Detroit, a technique (drawing from pantomime and experimental dancing and acting) which allowed the individual to create an altogether new identity by drawing on traits seen in 'visions' from a desired individual like Baker, to form a new identity. Luna would alter her attire, appearance, social circles, mannerisms and paralinguistic features like altering the pitch in her voice for instance, to create the character of Donyale. 
  Exemplified in an advert for a polyester peasant blouse in 1966 for Ebony magazine, the iconography work was said to evoke the black and white images of Man Ray, acknowledging the shift of the early 20th century 'visual modernism' morphed into the 'disjuncted body' (see Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the grotesque), a moving away from the classical Western notion of what a body should be, to one of 'distorted corporeal forms' originating in African Arts, Expressionism and Cubism and the body language of Josephine Baker which Luna emulates in the advertisement to create a more 'dynamic' image of herself and African-American visual imagery. 
  As a content creator, 'Luna's referencing of [Baker and Nefertiti] within the European context signaled her identification with them', as black women 'heroines and tropes' which Luna used as a model to emulate what black success could be presented as in an environment which responded to both figures to by 'primitivizing, sexualizing and ultimately dehumanizing [them in] ... exotic or erotic roles that did not provide occupational transitions to more fulfilling, post spectacle lives'. 
  Brown notes of how (in the early 20th century) 'the expression
caption: Josephine Baker Poster from 1938
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