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Estimate: $ 1,000 - $ 2,000
MANUSCRIPTS FROM 1940S COCTEAU, JEAN. Group of 10 Autograph Manuscripts, including 5 Signed, brief or fragmentary working drafts of reviews for books or films and notes for longer works intended for magazines or other publications, in French, some with title in holograph. Together 11 pages, 4to or folio, written on rectos of separate sheets, few on verso of abandoned drawing fragment or letter to him; few with an irregular edge, folds. Np, circa 1948
"Dance Card": "A dance card has always enchanted me, I, who do not go to balls. Enchanted in the strictest meaning of the term. Enclosed in an enchantment where the ball becomes something to which a real ball must resemble as little as possible. A kind of hurricane, therefore, a whirlwind in slow motion. . . . " [Film review]: "Such a Pretty Little Beach is one of the first French films that opposes heroically the dire industrialization of cinematography. By its relentless mechanism, by the photography where [cinematographer Henri] Alekan effaces work by dint of science, by the high cage of rain where Gérard Philipe casts his marvelous wounded bird face, the film of Yves Allégret deserves that the public renounce the idea that it forms of a film, and proceeds to read the film like a book." "Le Potomak": "A prediction before the war, an image of malaise, of youth in search of its way, a preface to the entire works of Jean Cocteau. . . ." "Olivier Larronde": "Olivier Larronde never yielded to any fashion, to any politeness. He understood, in a single blink of an eye, that the worst fashion was the one that doesn't think it is one and opposes fashions. This very young poet writes, with a diamond stylus, on the window pane against which the youth of 1947 moan or rebel. . . ." "Elegance and Fashion": "Elegance is not fashion. One is accustomed to confusing them. Elegance is an innate way of having fashion serve a particular allure that individualizes it and gives it a style resembling that of the human body. One sees that the form of the body itself changes with fashion, that shoulders widen or shrink, that the hips are accentuated or flattened . . . . "Fashion is insolent, haughty, rapid. It dies quickly. . . . It passes. It shows contempt. It crushes. . . ." "At the Home of Belgian Friends": "There is a Beauty and there is a beast. Beauty is a little country girl disguised as a princess. The Beast is a Prince Charming transformed into a beast. There's a family that lives in a house where the style of Vermeer reigns. . . . There is the word of Paul Eluard, whom one asks what he thinks of this film and who answers: to understand this film, one must love one's dog more than one's car. There are people who judge works and works that judge people. . . . There is Jean Cocteau who comes to address him [Eluard] and who greets him." [On Indian art]: "One of my friends sent from the temples of India photographs of sculpture too high and too distant to be seen with the naked eye. This work results in a magnificence so grave and so lively, an enigma so noble, that I invoke them when the question of liberty arises. . . . I bow before races where the slightest gesture signifies. I bow before the ceremonial of the profound Indies." "Hello from Paris": "Pretty, graceful, charming, adorable, light, tender; all of these terms are reduced by innumerable use, one would . . . restore them anew to apply them to Vertès like a white robe. . . . "Vertès could have descended the slope of success and gotten drunk there from vertigo. He hasn't done that. He kept his control and preserved his line. . . . "Greetings, Vertès, on your return from America. Hello from Paris."
