Jean Cocteau – The Kiss

Description

Jean Cocteau, The Kiss is an original Lithograph signed and dated in the plate, made in 1955.

Jean Cocteau, The Kiss exhibits how self-taught Cocteau would regularly draw his friends and acquaintances in a distinctive, fluid style informed by his interests in Cubism, psychoanalysis, and Catholicism. “Poets don’t draw,” he once quipped about his artworks. “They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.” Among his best-known works is the novel Les Enfants Terribles (1929) and his critically acclaimed films le Sang d’un poète (Blood of a Poet) (1930), La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) (1946), and Orphée (Orpheus) (1949). Cocteau died on October 11, 1963 at the age of 74 in Milly-la-Foret, France. Today, his works are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, among others.

Cocteau’s first early success was the ballet Parade, written with composer Erik Satie, painter Pablo Picasso, choreographer Leonide Massine, and Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev of the Russian Ballet. Telling of a group of mysterious promoters trying unsuccessfully to entice spectators into a circus tent where an undefined spectacle is taking place, Parade is generally considered to be the first of the modern ballets. It was also Cocteau’s “first public attempt,” Alan G. Artner explained in the Chicago Tribune, “to express the mysterious and eternal in the everyday.” Jacques Guicharnaud and June Beckelman wrote in Modern French Theatre from Giraudoux to Beckett that Parade “has a theme that might serve as a symbol for the whole of Cocteau’s works: Cocteau keeps his public outside. The true spectacle of the inner circus remains forbidden, despite the poet’s innumerable invitations to enter. And perhaps that inner circus is no more than an absolute vacuum.”

Jean Cocteau was an enormously influential French artist and writer known as one of the major figures of Dada and Surrealism. With an oeuvre that spanned painting, novels, poetry, plays, and films, Cocteau established himself as a leading creative force in Paris. A regular member of the avant-garde, he maintained long-term friendships with artists such as Pablo Picasso. The job of the poet (a job which can’t be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force,” he once mused.  Born on July 5, 1889 in Maisons-Laffitte.

Jean Cocteau, The Kiss

Jean Cocteau art for sale

Jean Cocteau prints for sale