?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900
JEAN COCTEAU (1889-1963)
Portrait of Mary Butts. Pencil on paper mounted on board. 263x203 mm; 10 1/4x8 inches. Unsigned on recto but gifted by Cocteau to Glenway Wescott, with Wescott's description and address written in ink on verso. Circa 1928.
Provenance: Chevalier Tony Clark Collection.
Butts, a bisexual English writer, met Cocteau in Paris in the 1920s. The artist would create a similar line drawing portrait of her as the frontispiece for her memoir The Crystal Cabinet, 1937. Butts led a varied and interesting life; she was a disciple of, and co-author to, the occultist Aleister Crowley and was married to the modernist poet John Rodker, with whom she had a daughter. Through Rodker, she befriended and supported the publications of the group of writers which included Ezra Pound, May Sinclair, Roger Fry, Wyndham Lewis, and Ford Madox Ford.
