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Paris, Paris, France
Auction Details
Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau: l’Orphée moderne, Bonhams’ sale in Paris this October, is spot on with its title. Like the Greek god Orpheus – whose seductive lyre-playing charmed all creatures – Cocteau was an exotic, talented, fairy-tale creature, who charmed the cutting edge international artistic circles of Paris and beyond for the first half of the 20th century. With his talent for self-promotion, his magic touched minds that seem poles apart, from Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev to the brilliant British economist John Maynard Keynes. And his influence lives on through Cecil Beaton’s photographs (including Beaton’s penetrating images of Cocteau), in Philip Glass’s mesmerising music homage to Cocteau’s film Orphée, and in designers such as Luke Edward Hall.
Cocteau considered himself a poet in everything he did. Although he published more than 20 volumes of poetry, ‘poésie’ was how he described his innovative playwriting, librettos, novels and film-directing, as well as his painting, photography, ceramics and free lifestyle. The intrepid American novelist Edith Wharton met Cocteau, then in his early twenties, during her Paris sojourn before the First World War, and later remembered him as "a passionately imaginative youth to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundations of the Heavenly City".
Auction Curator:.jfif?width=280&aspect_ratio=100:101&quality=70)
Lucia Tro Santafe
Specialist - Impressionist and Modern Art, Prints & MultiplesTOP



























