Cocteau’s effects

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Chez Cocteau.

“Effects” in the sense of possessions rather than aesthetic or creative effects. I’ve been reading Jean Cocteau’s The Difficulty of Being, an essay collection in which the author muses on a variety of subjects, from his own life, his work, and people he knew, to more general considerations of the human condition. In one of the chapters Cocteau describes his rooms at 36 rue de Montpensier, Paris, where he lived from 1940 to 1947, offering a list of the objects that occupied the shelves or decorated the walls of his apartment. I always enjoy accounts of this sort; the pictures (or objects) that people choose to hang on their walls tell you things about a person’s tastes and character which might not be so obvious otherwise. The same can’t always be said for published lists of favourite books or other artworks when these may be constructed with an eye to the approval of one’s peers. The pictures decorating your living space are more private and generally more honest as aesthetic choices.

I already knew what a couple of these items looked like: the Radiguet bust, for example, may be seen in documentary footage. This post is an attempt to find some of the others. If you know the identity of any of the unidentified pieces then please leave a comment.


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The most engaging bits of such wreckage, thrown up on this little red beach, is without doubt the Gustave Doré group of which the Charles de Noailles gave me a plaster cast from which I had a bronze made. In it Perseus is to be seen mounted on the hippogryph, held in the air by means of a long spear planted in the gullet of the dragon, which dragon is winding its death throes round Andromeda.

“the Charles de Noailles” refers to Charles and his wife, Marie-Laure, a pair of wealthy art patrons who helped finance Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or and Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un Poète. Doré’s illustration (showing Ruggerio from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso reenacting the heroic rescue) is very familiar to me but I was unable to find any sculptural copies of the work. In addition to decorating Cocteau’s room some of Doré’s illustrations also served as inspiration for the sets in La Belle et la Bête.

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This group is on a column standing between the so-called castor window and a tall piece of slate that can be moved aside and that conceals a small room which is too cold to be used in winter. It was there that I wrote Renaud et Armide, away from everything, set free from telephone and door bells, in the summer of 1941, on an architect’s table above which one sees, saved from my room in the rue Vignon where it adorned the wall-paper, Christian Bérard’s large drawing in charcoal and red chalk representing the meeting of Oedipus and the Sphinx.

Bérard’s drawing is large indeed (see the photo at the top of this post). The artist was a theatrical designer, also the designer of La Belle et la Bête, and one of several of Cocteau’s friends who died young.

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On the right of my bed are two heads, one Roman, in marble, of a faun (this belonged to my Lecomte grandfather), the other of Antinoüs, under a glass dome, a painted terracotta, so fragile that only the steadiness of its enamel eyes can have led it here from the depths of centuries like a blind man’s white stick.

A third head adorns that of my bed: the terracotta of Raymond Radiguet, done by Lipschitz, in the year of his death.

And speaking of premature deaths… Antinous was the celebrated youth beloved of the emperor Hadrian whose death by drowning in the Nile caused Hadrian to establish a cult of Antinous that spread across the Roman Empire. Many busts and full-figure statues survive as a result, but I was unable to find a photo of the one owned by Cocteau. Raymond Radiguet, meanwhile, died of typhoid fever at the age of 20. Radiguet was a precocious talent who managed to write two novels before he died, including Le Diable au corps at the age of 16.

Continue reading “Cocteau’s effects”

The Purloined Eidolon

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Dreamland by Frederick Simpson Coburn.

By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule—
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE—Out of TIME.

Dreamland by Edgar Allan Poe

There’s always more Poe. Frederick Simpson Coburn was a Canadian artist who illustrated a 10-volume set of Edgar Allan Poe’s complete works in 1902, the collection being edited by Charles F. Richardson, and published in special editions with Poe-esque names such as “Arnheim” and “Eldorado”. Coburn was more of a painter than an illustrator so his full-page pieces tend to be stolidly professional in a manner that doesn’t really suit Poe’s fervid imagination. One exception is his illustration for Dreamland (aka Dream-Land) which would be more impressive if it hadn’t been so heavily “inspired” by a similar picture, The Black Idol or Resistance by František Kupka. Kupka’s picture dates from 1903 so it might seem at first that any suggestion of creative purloining should be dismissed (or even reversed) unless you know that The Black Idol was a slightly reworked version of a similar piece which appeared in a French magazine, Cocorico, in December 1900.

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The suspicion of appropriation is reinforced if you also know that Kupka’s earlier work was one of two Poe-derived pieces published in the same magazine, and was itself an illustration for Dreamland, with the first few lines of the poem in the Mallarmé translation being printed underneath the drawing. Coburn grew up in Quebec and moved to Paris in 1896 to study art; he was still there in 1900. Circumstantial evidence this may be but we don’t need the services of Auguste Dupin to suppose that Coburn might have remembered an illustration from a French magazine when the Poe commission arrived a year or so later.

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I’m not here to cast aspersions, the pressure of deadlines compelled me to swipe a chunk of Gustave Doré when I illustrated Poe myself a few years ago. I enjoy finding minor artistic connections like these, and the links between Coburn and Kupka are obscure enough that they probably haven’t been remarked on very much or even noticed until now. While we’re on the subject of dark eidolons, Dreamland was illustrated by William Heath Robinson in his own Poe edition in 1900. Robinson isn’t as sublimely grandiose as Kupka and Coburn but he also portrays Night as a literal figure. See the rest of his book here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Martin van Maële’s illustrated Poe
Narraciones extraordinarias by Edgar Allan Poe
Fritz Eichenberg’s illustrated Poe
The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope
Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrated Poe
Burt Shonberg’s Poe paintings
Illustrating Poe #5: Among the others
Illustrating Poe #4: Wilfried Sätty
Illustrating Poe #3: Harry Clarke
Illustrating Poe #2: William Heath Robinson
Illustrating Poe #1: Aubrey Beardsley
Poe at 200
The Tell-Tale Heart from UPA
William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe