Jean Cocteau: Autoportrait d’un inconnu

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The title translates as “self-portrait of an unknown” although “unknown man” would be better English. The phrase is a curious one to apply to Jean Cocteau, an artist (or “poet”, to use his favourite epithet) who was known for his creative work from a very early age. Director Edgardo Cozarinsky uses Cocteau’s own narration from a collection of documentary films to chart the evolution of a polymathic public life, following the progress of Cocteau’s art from the poetry of his youth (which the older man deemed “absurd”), to his involvement with the Ballets Russes, his films and plays, and his later flourishing as a painter of murals like those in the Chapelle Saint-Pierre de Villefranche-sur-Mer.

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In one of the later scenes Cocteau is shown talking to a wax figure of himself, describing the dummy as the one who goes out into the world to receive the plaudits and brickbats accorded to “Jean Cocteau” while the real Cocteau stays quietly at home in the south of France. The quotidian Cocteau would be the “unknown” in this respect; there’s no mention of his life with Jean Marais, for example, but I’m happy enough to spend an hour listening to him talking about his art. The reference to brickbats is a reminder that in France he was often reviled during his lifetime, regarded as a dilettante and a fraud. This was especially the case in André Breton’s Surrealist circle where those who wanted to avoid excommunication had to support the master’s lasting animus against the unknown poet.

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A pair of Surrealist untouchables, 1953.

Given this, I was amused to see a brief shot of Cocteau signing a wall with the most notorious member of Breton’s long list of outcasts, Salvador Dalí. Cocteau was friends with Dalí in later years, and in one of the film clips mentions the painter introducing him to the concept of “phoenixology” or the revival of dead matter. Dalí had biological science and his own immortality in mind but for Cocteau the idea becomes a metaphor for the artistic process, something we see in Le Testament d’Orphée and La Villa Santa Sospir when he pieces together the petals of disassembled flowers.

I was watching a copy of Cozarinsky’s film which may be downloaded at Ubuweb. The narration is in French throughout but English subtitles are available here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Orphée posters
Cocteau and Lovecraft
Cocteau drawings
Querelle de Brest
Halsman and Cocteau
La Belle et la Bête posters
The writhing on the wall
Le livre blanc by Jean Cocteau
Cocteau’s sword
Cristalophonics: searching for the Cocteau sound
Cocteau at the Louvre des Antiquaires
La Villa Santo Sospir by Jean Cocteau

Orphée posters

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Not a film poster. Orphée aux Yeux Perlés (1950) by Jean Cocteau.

After watching Jean Cocteau’s Orphée again this weekend I went looking for the film’s posters. There was more variety out there than I expected. Nothing as lavish as the posters for La Belle et la Bête but then you’d expect a fairy tale to be presented with more visual flair than Cocteau’s modernist myth. Most of the early examples are collaged arrangements of stills that give little idea of the film’s originality or dream-like qualities. I was hoping there might be some interesting Polish, Czech or Japanese designs but if there are they didn’t show up in my searches.

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France, 1950.

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France, 1950.

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France, 1950.

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Belgium, 1950.

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Weekend links 781

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Orphée aux Enfers (1896) by Jean Delville

• “Yes, there was a riot, but it was great”: Cabaret Voltaire on violent gigs, nuclear noise – and returning to mark 50 years.

• At Public Domain Review: Matthew Mullane on George Wightwick’s The Palace of Architecture (1840).

• New music: Dissever by Emptyset; Quiet Pieces by Abul Mogard; Analogues by Lawson & Merrill.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Artist Yukiko Suto finds beauty in Japanese residential neighbourhoods.

• At The Quietus: A Condition of the Space: Mary Anne Hobbs interviewed.

• At Baja el Signo de Libra: The homoerotic photography of Yves Paradis.

• Mix of the week: Bleep Mix #303 by Abul Mogard.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Stan Brakhage Day.

• RIP Edmund White.

Brakhage (1997) by Stereolab | Brakhage (2002) by Robert Poss | Barbican Brakhage (2009) by John Foxx

Edward Wadsworth woodcuts

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Englische Graphik (1923).

More art that caught my attention this week. Edward Wadsworth (1889–1949) is one of those artists with a single work that turns up regularly in social media, prompting a “Wow!” response before everyone moves onto something else. Dazzle Ships in Dry Dock at Liverpool (1919) is the Wadsworth that everyone likes, a painting that combines the artist’s persistent theme of ships and shipping with his experience as a member of the Vorticists, and a designer of “dazzle” camouflage for marine vessels. The dazzle fad didn’t last very long, and was of doubtful utility in any case, but it did give us many pictures of destroyers and batteships painted like floating masses of abstract art.

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Platelayers’ Sheds (1914/1918).

Wadsworth’s prints, which include a few dazzle ships, are the kind of bold black-and-white art I always enjoy seeing, pictures that push their representations to the edge of abstraction. The woodcuts differ so much from his later paintings—quasi-Surrealist accumulations of tidal flotsam and other objects arranged against views of the seashore—they might be the work of a different artist altogether.

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Liverpool Shipping (1918).

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Dock Scene (c.1918).

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Townscape (1920).

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The art of Martin Monnickendam, 1874–1943

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Gevel van de Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois.

Martin Monnickendam was a Dutch artist whose work caught my attention not for his paintings but for this series of etchings showing views of the streets and older buildings of Paris. The Rijksmuseum gives the series a date of 1896, when the artist was a mere 22 years of age but already working with a proficiency that makes me wish he’d done more in this style. Monnickendam’s subject and medium brings to mind Charles Méryon’s celebrated etchings of Paris but Méryon’s depictions of Notre-Dame and elsewhere generally place the buildings at a distance. Monnickendam fills his plates with closer views of architectural detail, showing how good the etching medium can be in capturing Gothic crenellations. All of which is of particular interest to me now that I’m working again on The Dunwich Horror. Lovecraft’s story doesn’t feature any specifically Gothic architecture but the detailed shading I’ve been doing is closer to etching than anything else.

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Gezicht op de Saint-Gervais.

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Impasse des Boeufs.

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Marché des Carmes.

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Notre-Dame van Moret-sur-Loing .

Continue reading “The art of Martin Monnickendam, 1874–1943”