Jean Cocteau and the French Scene [VINTAGE 1984] [FIRST EDITION]

Fine unread condition red cloth boards with gold spine lettering contained in a fine condition non price-clipped color illustrated and black-and-white photographic dust jacket. Includes Preface by Arthur King Peters; A Jean Cocteau Chronology; Acknowledgments; Contributors; Index and Photographic Credits. Illustrated with nearly one hundred period black-and-white photographs, paintings, and drawings, including many previously unpublished works. "There are as many Cocteaus as there are biographers of him," writes composer Ned Rorem in this strikingly illustrated book. Nineteen eight-three, the year of the twentieth anniversary of the death of this supremely versatile artist, brought an outpouring of commemorative exhibitions, publications, performances, homages, and reassessments of this "mirror and victim of his time." His creative life began in Proustian Paris and the dying embers of the fin de siecle; came to precocious maturity in the midst of the vanguard achievements and conflicts of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism; and actively continued throughout the next three decades. His associations and collaborations with everyone from Diaghilev and Stravinsky to Picasso, Satie, and Les Six remain as abidingly interesting as do his films and the proteges he discovered, Radiguet and Marais. Cocteau remained an enfant terrible of the arts througout his long life. He put in fifty years of hard labor in what film critic Stephen Harvey describes as "eight or nine of the seven lively arts." Poet, portraitist, painter, novelist, playwright, impresario, muralist, designer, and filmmaker, Cocteau was the greatest multimedia artist of his times. His collaborative spirit made him a catalyst for all the arts, just as his energy and wit for all the arts, just as his energy and wit made him a bridge between haut-monde Paris and the avant-garde of Montparnasse and Montmartre. His lust for attention and his talent for self promtion led observers to call him "the most photographed man" in Paris - a fact admirably documented by this book. In Jean Cocteau and the French Scene, eight prominent French and American authors adress Cocteau's incessant artistic activities. These trenchant essays relate the poet's kaleidoscopic talents to the larger canvas of the artistic, literary, theatrical, musical, cinematic, and intellectual worlds in which he flourished. Francis Steegmuller, who received a Pulitzer prize for an earlier biography of Cocteau, investigates the circumstances, events, and interconnections of Cocteau's life. Roger Shattuck describes Cocteau's many shapes," and considers his often uneasy relationship to the Parisian avante-garde. Art historian Dore Ashton provides an intellectual backdrop to the artist's own shifting ideas and sources in a discussion of the major currents of thought that emerged during half a century and two world wars. Breaking new ground, Kenneth Silver examines the influence of the image d'Epinal on several of Cocteau's theatrical collaborations, pointing out the ways in which the French popular prints were transmuted for costumes and characters in Parade and other productions. Other articles include Pierre Chanel's critique of Cocteau's drawings and illustrations, Neal Oxenhandler on the three perioes of Cocteau's work for the theater, and Ned Rorem on Cocteau's musical ideas and his relationship with Les Six. Stephen Harvey, one of our most perceptive young critics, examines Cocteau's development as a filmmaker and considers the seamless artifice and erotic symbolism that made his films precursors of modern cinema. This collection is embellished with reproductions of nearly one hundred period photographs, paintings, and drawings, including many previously unpublished works." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps.…