Jean Cocteau

Maria Tatar states that the fairy-tale Beauty and the Beast depicts, “The transformative power of empathy, that encodes messages about […] romance, marriage, and ‘The Other’” (9). Because of these coded messages, the story and its many retellings have provided fertile ground for discussions on empathy and gender. The tale, from its very inception, has managed to resonate with how different eras view empathy and its interactions with gender relations, which can be seen through the multiple adaptations and variations of the tale. Through four chapters, my dissertation explores four iterations of Beauty and the Beast, along with other culturally mainstream “beastly” media, through the lens of gender and empathy. The first chapter explores Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont’s 1756 fairy-tale, and how it reflects conflicting ideas of sympathy and arranged marriage. The second chapter discusses how Jean Cocteau’s 1946 avant-garde film subverts the 1940s culture of gender conformism along with its forcing of female domesticity, and does so by reflecting Simone de Beauvoir’s ideas of gendered reciprocity. The third chapter considers the manifestation of the New Sincerity in Disney’s 1991 animated film, and how it prioritises male transformation over female self-definition. The fourth chapter, which covers the Disney 2017 remake, looks at how feminist critique targets the fairy-tale, and how it is counteracted by the trend of nostalgia within media. I conclude that the multiple iterations of Beauty and the Beast show that despite being a “Tale as old as time,” the story is still being told in accordance with western society’s view of gender relations and empathy, and it is very likely that the tale will continue to be told.

La crisis del lenguaje ha sido un fenómeno que ha recorrido la historia de la literatura. Ha sido tratado como mal estacionario, derivando en la figura actual del Blocked Writer, tanto como la materia prima de la que se ha ido creando una nueva poética: la poética del silencio. Han sido muchos los autores que a lo largo de sus trayectorias acabaron sumergiéndose en la poética del blanco inaugural, de la escritura sin palabras y de la apropiación de recursos de otras disciplinas para suplir esa crisis, como es el caso de Jean Cocteau a través de su recorrido personal por el mito de Orfeo, que pasó de los esbozos en sus diarios a obra de teatro, y de obra de teatro a sus dos películas más personales: 'Orfeo' y 'El testamento de Orfeo'.

Fin 1917, Apollinaire place l’« esprit nouveau » sous la notion centrale et banale de la « surprise ». Il cherche alors à fédérer un groupe de poètes proches des cubistes, qui prend l’ascendant sur la scène littéraire cette année-là. Les réactions sont immédiates, tant chez les complices (Cocteau, Cendrars, Jacob, Reverdy) que chez les adversaires (Tzara, Vaché, Breton). La « surprise » devient alors le terme que les différents acteurs du réseau poétique s’approprient, dans la coopération ou la rivalité. Cette étude montre comment une notion au faible intérêt esthétique devient subitement emblématique des plus fortes innovations poétiques d’une année charnière. Elle donne également un aperçu d'une critique des réseaux d'un point de vue historique.

Proust has shown little interest in the decorative arts of his time, but his work bears the mark of the "submarine style" distinctive of Art nouveau. The low bookshelves with glass panes in the Grand Hôtel room at Balbec ― the symbol of À la Recherche’s unity, according to Georges Poulet in Proustian Space ― prove to be authentic witnesses of “modern style”. But what does “modern style” actually mean? À la Recherche includes five occurrences of the expression that could lead to misunderstanding. Contrary to a preconceived idea, it is not the English name for Art nouveau. This French coined anglicism refers to the international revival of the decorative arts at the beginning of the twentieth century, a fascinating but disturbing blend of aesthetics and social ideas. Proust detected at once and discreetly highlighted the cosmopolitan and "rastaquouère" (so to speak "métèque") inspiration of an ephemeral artistic movement contemporary with the Dreyfus affair. Enriched with an abundant and entirely original iconography, full of new discoveries and identifications, Rastaquarium brings back to life an epoch of which the novelist caught the essence. For the first time the whole question of decorative arts in À la recherche is fully tackled in all its ramifications, in a fascinating instance of the network of connections at the heart of Proust’s system.

Proust n’a manifesté que bien peu d’intérêt pour les arts décoratifs de son temps, mais son œuvre ponctuée d’aquariums est marquée par le «style sous-marin» caractéristique de l’Art nouveau. Les «bibliothèques vitrées» de la chambre de Balbec ― dans lesquelles Georges Poulet voyait le symbole de l’unité de l’œuvre ― se révèlent d’authentiques témoins du «modern style». Mais qu’est-ce que le «modern style»? L’expression, qui revient cinq fois dans À la Recherche du temps perdu, n’avait jamais vraiment été élucidée. Contrairement à une idée reçue, ce n’est en rien le nom anglais de l’Art nouveau. Cet anglicisme bien français désigne un renouveau international des arts décoratifs qui, mêlant esthétique et idées sociales, fascine et inquiète… Proust a parfaitement perçu et discrètement mis en valeur l’inspiration cosmopolite et «rastaquouère» d’un courant artistique dont le bref épanouissement coïncide avec les années de l’affaire Dreyfus. Enrichi d’une vaste iconographie, entièrement originale, fourmillant de trouvailles et d’identifications nouvelles, Rastaquarium fait revivre une époque dont l’écrivain a su capter l’essentiel. Toujours abordée de façon fragmentaire, la question des arts décoratifs dans la Recherche n’avait jamais été traitée dans son ensemble, seule manière de saisir les réseaux de correspondances si chers à Proust.


Table of Contents

Note sur l’iconographie – Remerciements – Abréviations

Rastaquarium

Qu’est-ce que l’Art « nouveau » ?

Le « modern style » n’est pas un style

Naissance d’une expression

Le mobilier des Proust

Le monde de Liberty

Contre Ruskin

1905 : « Sur la lecture »

La Femme inconnue de Lille et le Printemps par « Brown »

Le moment Maple

Bing !

Le « modern style » dans la Recherche

Les bibliothèques vitrées de Balbec

De la référence anglaise à la référence bavaroise : le Salon d’Automne de 1910

Style « sous-marin »

Le Royaume de Neptune ou la civilisation de l’aquarium

Le « modern style », agent de l’étranger

L’esthétique dreyfusarde

Siegfried n’est pas Samuel

Le règne de l’impur

Le style franco-sémitique

Une nouvelle croisade

Dreyfusards avant Dreyfus

Style rastaquouère

Bibliographie - Index nominum - Table des illustrations

Picasso lithographer and activist is a revised English language version of the book Picasso litógrafo y militante, (WorldCat No. 952991448), published by the Picasso Foundation, Málaga, in 2016. It  is the first commented catalogue raisonné of Picasso litographs. The book enumerates practically all Picasso lithographs, illustrating most of them and explaining why or how they were made. It also reveals for the first time the reasons and circumstances of Picasso’s lithographic career, overcoming the painter’s attempts to hide the facts, and particularly Georges Braque’s role in the introduction. It also uncovers a formerly unknown new aesthetics developed by Picasso for years, and his motivations to do it: to mock the Communist Party and its pressure on the painter to adopt socialist realism. The aesthetic starts with the catalog of arbitrary signs contained in the 125 lithographs of the book Le Chant des Morts, and its best known oil painting examples are the two versions of La Cuisine.

Bu çalışmada, Fransız besteci Erik Satie'nin politik, sanatsal, estetik duruşu bütünsel olarak ele alınarak eserlerindeki avangard yaklaşım ve tekniklerin 20. yüzyıl müziği üzerindeki etkileri araştırılmıştır. Çalışmanın ilk bölümünde 20. yüzyıl avangard düşüncesinin arka planı Paris özelinde incelenerek radikal avangard hareketlerin doğuşu ve kuramsal karşılıkları araştırılmıştır. Satie'nin yakın ilişkide olması ve eserlerini dönemin önemli radikal avangard sanatçılarıyla birlikte oluşturması sebebiyle Dada ve Sürrealizm hareketleri detaylı olarak irdelenmiştir. İkinci bölümde sosyal, politik ve ekonomik anlamda Satie'nin hayatını şekillendiren önemli olaylar -bu perspektifin dışında kalacak detaylar dahil edilmeyerek- kronolojik yaklaşımla anlatılmıştır. Bestecinin eserleri; hayatı, politik ve estetik koşullar doğrultusunda üç ana başlık altında kategorize edilmiştir. Çalışmada üç döneme ayrılan eserler kronolojik olarak ele alınmış olsa da inceleme sonucunda ortaya çıktığı gibi, Satie'nin besteciliği geleneksel sanat anlayışındaki ilerlemeci yaklaşımın aksine döngüseldir. Besteci ilk dönemlerinden itibaren -ilk bakışta aksi görülecek olsa da- üretme edimi yaklaşımında oldukça tutarlı olmuş, yeni biçimler geliştirdiğinde önceki biçim ve anlatım tekniklerine her zaman geri dönmüş, yeni eserleriyle iç içe kullanmıştır. Son olarak bu bölümde 1915-1925 yılları arasındaki Satie'nin dahil olduğu kolektif üretime dayalı avangard sanat eserleri incelenmiştir. Satie'nin eserlerindeki 20. Yüzyıl sanatı ve müziğini etkileyen yenilikçi unsurlar ayrı bir başlıkta tek tek yazılmamış, ikinci bölümle birlikte yaşamı ve eserleriyle diyalektik olarak ortaya konmuştur.

Surrealist cinema flourished in France in the late 1920s, but following the widespread adoption of synchronized sound in Europe in 1929, its future was uncertain. The anti-musical stance of many Surrealists (particularly André Breton), who believed that the abstract nature of music violated surrealism’s philosophical, literary, and aesthetic principles, made the very concept of surrealist sound film problematic. With the heightened realism of synchronized dialogue and the presence of a recorded
musical soundtrack, music’s role in the new audiovisual form threatened to destabilize the dream logic that surrealist filmmakers had established in silent cinema. But the new technology also offered an opportunity for composers and directors to renegotiate music’s role in surrealist film.

I argue that music became a crucial tool in early conceptions of surrealist audiovisual cinema, when sound film’s potential energy was at its height. I examine two of France’s first sound films—Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’or (1930) and Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète (1930)—both of which favored an audiovisual aesthetic relying heavily on
surrealist principles. These controversial films deliberately avoided realism, employing music as a tool for audiovisual juxtaposition, pastiche, and shock value. For Le Sang d’un poète composer Georges Auric wrote a score that Cocteau proceeded to cut
up and reorder, an experiment in “accidental synchronization” and a means of avoiding explicit musical signification. Buñuel incorporated preexisting classical works—by composers including Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner—into L’Age d’or and juxtaposed them with absurd, even offensive, images. Though their approaches to the soundtrack differed, both directors experimented with film rhythm and pacing, with
contrasting synchronism and audiovisual counterpoint, and with violating expectations of audiovisual unity. This brief but productive intersection between avant-garde cinematic and musical modernist practices at a critical juncture in France’s nascent sound film production influenced subsequent French cinematic experiments, particularly those of the Nouvelle Vague. My analysis of the music in L’Age d’or and Le Sang
d’un poète theorizes the audiovisual elements constituting surrealist sound film; it also highlights the inherently surreal characteristics of the sound film medium itself, characteristics that most mainstream filmmakers would later try their hardest to erase.

Volume 9 of the Catalogue raisonné of the Orozco collection of artist and illustrated books as well as prints, dedicated to Jean Arp, Jean Cocteau, André Masson, Max Ernst, Wilfredo Lam, Roger Van de Wouwer, Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Salvador Dalí &,  Jorge Castillo

Η αφάνταστη δραματουργική και θεματολογική ποικιλία που διατρέχει το έργο του Κοκτώ, από τους νεωτερισμούς της εποχής του στην τραγωδία και στο μπουλβάρ και από τη φάρσα στην πραγμάτευση της ιστορίας και στη θεολογική διαμάχη δεν δρα αποπροσανατολιστικά, εάν παραμερίσουμε τους τρόπους προσέγγισης και επικεντρωθούμε στον συγγραφέα και στις βαθύτερες ανησυχίες και εμμονές του. Ασφαλώς μια από τις κυρίαρχες είναι ο θάνατος. Το κάτοπτρο του θεάτρου παρέχει μια απεικόνιση του κόσμου, ιδωμένου μέσα σε  μια άλλη διάσταση, σε ένα άλλο φως που για τον Κοκτώ είναι αυτό της ποίησης. Επεξεργάζεται εικόνες ενοχής κι απελευθέρωσης που συχνά πραγματώνονται μέσα από την ειλικρίνεια και τις πανουργίες του έρωτα. Όταν εν τέλει συνενώσουμε όλες τις ψηφίδες του δραματουργικού του κόσμου, σκιαγραφείται ένα πολυπρόσωπο απείκασμα της ανθρωπότητας.
Παρουσίαση:
Β. Χατζηβασιλείου, Αφιέρωμα της «Νέας Εστίας» στον Ζαν Κοκτώ
http://www.amna.gr/home/article/328625/Afieroma-tis-Neas-Estias-ston-Zan-Kokto

Parade, which premiered on May 18, 1917 at the Théâtre du Chatelet, was the result of a collaboration between Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Léonide Massine, and Erik Satie, all under the guidance of the “monstre sacré” of the Ballets Russes – Serge Diaghilev.  The ballet tells the story of a troupe of itinerant performers on the streets of Paris as they offer a preview of their show in an effort to draw an audience, an effort that ultimately fails. Even before the curtain fell, life had imitated art and audiences were voicing their derision by shouting such insults as “Métèques,” “Sales Boches,” “Trahison,” “Art munichois,” “embusqués,” and others that convey a hatred of the perceived unpatriotic German behavior of the ballet’s collaborators.  This ire was mostly directed at Pablo Picasso and seems to be due to the cubist character of several of his designs for both the décor and costumes.

While most condemned the ballet, others more attuned to the various styles at work in the larger aesthetic of the production attempted to offer explication. One such figure was Jean Cocteau himself, who, in an article for Vanity Fair, offered an explanation that seems at odds with his own subtitle “Ballet Réaliste” and his continuous urgings to the men to “Soyons Vulgaire” or “be vulgar” during the ballet’s conception.  He offers an interpretation of the ballet that hinges on Picasso and Satie’s incorporation of neoclassicism into the production. This is even more intriguing when one realizes how much Diaghilev had pushed Cocteau out of the creative and promotional processes surrounding the Ballet. Additionally, Satie worked from a scenario not entirely of Cocteau’s original intention – he worked from a version of the scenario rewritten without Cocteau’s knowledge by Picasso. Over the course of this essay, I will be exploring how this neoclassicism is represented visually, and I intend to offer an interpretation of Picasso’s rideau de scène, or overture curtain, in particular (Fig 1). I hope to relate the imagery of the curtain, which is nostalgically classicizing while remaining mildly cubist in style, to the overall scenario of the ballet. In doing so, I plan to argue that facing the negative criticism of the perceived foreign influence of Cubism, combined with negative attitudes toward foreign civilian non-combatant artists during WWI, Picasso used the framework of Cocteau’s scenario to explore the dilemma of the avant-garde (appropriately symbolized by the performers) to present a mélange of current progressive visual possibilities. However, Picasso saves his solution, just like the main act of the parade, for the unseen interior of the tent that is represented on the rideau de scène in a veiled visual language of classicism.

Beginning with a brief summary of the Ballets Russes’ place in the landscape of Parisian art and theatre, this essay will continue by recounting the process by which Parade came to be. After presenting the scenario of the ballet and its various characters and costumes, I will turn to its critical reception, particularly the anti-cubist attitudes and insults hurled at the collaborators. I will do my best to fit these into both the context of current wartime events as well as into the context of the anti-cubist criticisms of the 1910’s as described by Kenneth Silver. Finally, I will explore the nostalgic neoclassicist vein of the ballet and suggest that this was the intention of Picasso in his conception of the curtain in relation to the greater action of the ballet.

No previous study has dealt in such depth with the shadowgraphs later called “Rayographs” that Man Ray began making in Paris around 1921/22. This account of Man Ray is very different to that usually given in the literature. It deconstructs a couple of myths as the discovery of the Rayographs by a dark chamber accident and studies the early reception in the 1920's contextualizing it for instance in Germany also beyond Dada and Surrealism. This preliminary English translation of the first 10 pages gives an outlook on the much more abundant chapter discussing among others Ray's early artistic development in the United States revealing a highly distinctive, projective approach to images as a “new art in two dimensions". This 60-pages chapter is part of the German monograph "Bild. Körper. Projektion - eine Kulturgeschichte der Schattenbilder".

Ernest (de) GENGENBACH. Sa vie.  Christophe STENER, BoD. 2022
Préface de notre ouvrage consacré à la vie d'Ernest (de) GENGENBACH (1903-1979), un épigone du Surréalisme injustement oublié ayant alterné ouvrages satanises et témoignages mariaux. Le second tome, consacré à son œuvre, paraîtra cet automne.

Preface to our book dedicated to the life of Ernest (de) GENGENBACH (1903-1979), an unjustly forgotten epigone of Surrealism who wrote both satanic books and pious ones dedicated to Virgin Mary. The second volume, His work, will be published this fall.

BoD, 2022, ISBN 9782322198979 & 9782322437191

Webinaire "Mythes et Discours, entre l'inter et le trans" (26-27 mai 2021)

Résumé
L’ objectif de cette communication est d’examiner les significations du mythe orphique dans le film de Jean-Luc Godard, Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998). Plus précisément, on vise à aborder les nouvelles possibilités expressives que déploie la transformation de ce mythe fameux relativement à l’élaboration de la notion d’histoire figurale. Pour le cinéaste, Orphée n’est pas seulement un personnage du mythe mais aussi une figure historique, qui nous permet de réfléchir sur la poésie et l’histoire à la fois. Dans la mesure où la poétique rencontre l’histoire, Godard traite le geste mythique d’Orphée, ce retournement fatal à Eurydice, cet essai inespéré de sa résurrection, à la fois comme un moyen de structurer son montage et comme point de départ de sa réflexion sur les affinités de la notion d’histoire avec la pratique cinématographique. Comme Orphée regarde en arrière, le monde des ruines et des fantômes, le cinéaste-historien, considère les innombrables bobines de films et autres médias audiovisuels pour composer l'histoire du cinéma comme un lieu entre le passé et le présent, précisément, par rapport aux gestes cinématographiques et aux événements du siècle précédent. Le mythe orphique s’inscrit dans ce qui est l'une des idées principales du film godardien, « l'image viendra au temps de la résurrection », par rapport à ce temps qui manque, avec l’espoir, pourtant, d'un au-delà de cette mort. C’est pourquoi on peut penser qu’Histoire(s) du cinéma reviennent vers un cinéma mythique, qui a une fonction, celle de destruction et de rédemption à la fois, de « résurrection ». De ce point de vue, Histoire(s) du cinéma en revenant au mythe découvrent dans la notion d’histoire le concept de la résurrection comme l’a aussi fait au XIXe siècle l’historien Jules Michelet.

Never anxious about artistic ‘borrowing,’ Tennessee Williams reputedly considered himself heir to this perennial practice as he lavishly ‘littered’ his own ‘original’ works with overt and covert references to literary luminaries from past and present (Debusscher 1997). And yet, it is safe to say that much of his cultural renown is due to his ‘unique’ artistic sensitivity. However, with one fellow artist this barefaced borrowing takes on a reciprocal turn – nurtured by a shared fascination with the mythological figure of Orpheus (Kontaxopoulos 2001), an ambitious adaptation of Streetcar by one of them (Lieber 2005), an equally shared admiration by and fascination for the actress Tallulah Bankhead (Debusscher 1982), and finally a conspicuous copying of significant chunks from The Eagle Has Two Heads by the other (ibid.). Indeed, the artistic interactions between Tennessee Williams and the French paragon of modernism Jean Cocteau strike by their repeated returns. This essay therefore ambitions to pick up where leading Williams scholar Gilbert Debusscher’s analysis about the impact of Cocteau’s Eagle on The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore left off thirty years ago. By both retracing the intricacies of their mutual influences while assessing the stylistic and semiotic means with which these came into being, it purports to present an analogy-based reassessment of the Williams-Cocteau interchange and of the so-called ‘problem of influence’ alike. After all, as argued by Harold Bloom in his landmark study The Anxiety of Influence, claims pertaining to this notion must be embedded in analogy-based reasoning because the very integration of influences into an aesthetic sensitivity constitutes a fundamental part of the lifecycle of an artist as artist (Bloom, 1997). Accordingly, the ‘impure’ concept of influence paradoxically becomes a rare credible means of gauging the ‘original’ contributions of Williams and Cocteau as culturally androgynous artists.

According to Cultural Mythcriticism, there is no myth without character (a person in the world of fiction). This article shows how this methodology works in any artistic production, even when we deal with either objects or animals, and is extremely helpful to distinguish much confusion in Mythology. Three plays of theatre, all of them about Antigone, are studied here (Sophocles, Cocteau, and Anouilh). Pages 1-3 are devoted to an Exhibition on Myths held in Madrid in 2017.

The God father of my class in high school
Le parrain de ma promotion d’École Normale

JAMAIS TROP TARD POUR BIEN FAIRE
NEVER TOO LATE TO DO GOOD


SOMMAIRE

1. JEAN COCTEAU – LE SANG D’UN POÈTE – 1933 – (non disponible sauf sur l’Internet) – SCÉNARIO – EDITIONS DU ROCHER - 1999

2. JEAN COCTEAU – JEAN DELANNOY – JEAN MARAIS – L’ÉTERNEL RETOUR – 1943

3. JEAN COCTEAU – LES PARENTS TERRIBLES – 1948

4. JEAN COCTEAU – JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE – LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES - 1950

5. JEAN COCTEAU – JEAN MARAIS – ORPHÉE – 1950

6. JEAN COCTEAU – JEAN MARAIS – LE TESTAMENT D’ORPHÉE - 1959

7. JEAN COCTEAU – JOSÉE DAYAN – LES PARENTS TERRIBLES – 2003

Selon Ray Harryhausen, maître des effets spéciaux cinématographiques, « Gustave Doré aurait été un grand chef opérateur […] il regardait les choses avec le point de vue de la caméra ». L’œuvre de Doré a marqué de manière indélébile l’imaginaire filmique depuis ses origines. Peu de films sur la Bible, depuis la Vie et Passion de Jésus Christ produit par Pathé en 1902, qui ne se réfèrent à ses illustrations, ni d’adaptation cinématographique de Dante ou encore de Don Quichotte qui ne l’aient pris comme modèle, de Georg Wilhelm Pabst et Orson Welles à Terry Gilliam. Il n’est pas de films sur la vie londonienne et victorienne qui n’empruntent leurs décors aux visions de Londres, un pèlerinage, qu’il s’agisse de David Lean, de Roman Polanski ou de Tim Burton. Nombre de scènes oniriques, fantastiques, fantasmagoriques ont puisé dans l’œuvre graphique de Doré, depuis le Voyage dans la lune de Georges Méliès en 1902. Si dans le domaine du dessin animé ou de l’animation, la dette de Walt Disney envers Doré est immense, ses forêts « primitives », notamment celles d’Atala, ont aussi servi aux différentes versions de King Kong, de l’original de 1933 au film de 2005 de Peter Jackson qui s’était déjà appuyé sur l’œuvre de Doré dans Le Seigneur des anneaux. Ce chapitre du catalogue de l’exposition "Gustave Doré : l’imaginaire au pouvoir" présentée au Musée d’Orsay à Paris et au Musée des Beaux-Arts du Canada à Ottawa, qui prend corps dans un choix d'extraits de films "accrochés" à côté des gravures, montre comment, depuis la dette explicite de Jean Cocteau dans La Belle et la bête (1945) jusqu'aux réminiscences doréennes du personnage de Chewbacca dans la Guerre des Etoiles, le cinéma a « gravé » Doré dans l’imaginaire du XXe siècle.

No Kidding! Clown as Protagonist in Twentieth-Century Theater examines the way clown was transformed into a serious character in twentieth-century theater. Modernist theater practitioners recognized that clown's approach to performance is profoundly different from other modes of theatrical representation. The paradox of clown, a traditionally marginal, comic character thrust into center stage as the focus of the agon, provided a stimulating new way to renovate tragedy. Experiments with clown by Jean Cocteau, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Giorgio Strehler, Dario Fo, and Roberto Benigni are examined as a means of exploring how and why clown became, in contemporary theater and film, a character from whom audiences expect philosophizing, angst, or political criticism as much as physical comedy and fractured language.

The article depicts the perception of Pablo Picasso’s painting by the vanguard French poets. The author considers theoretical and critical texts by Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, Jean Cocteau, Louis Aragon and André Breton published between 1905-1930. Nearly all the texts present Picasso as a genious artist who revolutioned fine arts. While analizing his work poets concentrated primarily on the problem of artistic genious and relations between aesthetic discoveries in painting and poetry at the beginning of the XX century.

In the early sixties, a British-American company with the name of ‘Mediterranean Industries’ set up a weaving workshop with the specific aim of producing high-end original rya rugs designed by established European artists. Tadek Beutlich, a Polish- born a leading innovator in textile art and weaving, living in England, was approached to come over to Malta to train women in the technique of rya rug weaving.  The workshop initiated collaboration with a number of artists of international standing, including Jean Cocteau, in order to produce rugs based on their respective cartoons.  The first exhibition of these works were introduced by the notorious literary critic Miron Grindea.

La storia di questa meravigliosa disciplina continua partendo dal balletto che negli anni che seguirono il 1871 si ispirò a temi grandiosi ed accolse il linguaggio popolare e che  racconta le lotte di inventori e scopritori contro le forze del male che vorrebbero fermare il corso della civiltà, fino ad arrivare alla  folgorante la stella di Diaghilev, l’uomo che senza essere musicista, nè coreografo, nè scenografo si incarica di porre le premesse per la nascita del balletto moderno e dà vita al più fecondo movimento teatrale del XX secolo.

José Corti, coll. Les Essais, 2022.
Au cœur des Années folles, toute une constellation de poètes part à l’aventure du roman. D’Apollinaire à Supervielle – en passant par Albert-Birot, Beucler, Cendrars, Cocteau, Delteil, Grey, Havet, Jacob, Jouve, Mac Orlan, Morand, Reverdy, Salmon ou encore Soupault –, nombreux sont les écrivains modernistes à explorer le genre favori de l’industrie littéraire. Dans un climat d’émulation collective, ils expérimentent les formes romanesques selon des formules insolites : non seulement ils perturbent les conventions réalistes, mais ils tonifient le genre en variant ses proportions, ses rythmes, ses énonciations, ses personnages – afin de les accorder au « profond aujourd’hui ».
Ce livre vise donc à combler une lacune dans nos histoires du roman au xxe siècle. Dans une perspective sociopoétique, il montre comment, en marge des œuvres canoniques de Proust ou de Joyce, et à l’écart du surréalisme, ces textes modernistes de langue française participent au renouvellement mondial du genre. Ainsi réhabilite-t-il un corpus longtemps déclassé, ou mal classé, pour rappeler qu’il a existé en France – et bien avant le Nouveau Roman – un « roman nouveau ».

According to Ray Harryhausen, a special effects expert in the film industry, “Gustave Doré would have made a great director of photography . . . He saw things from the point of view of the camera.” Doré’s work has had a permanent impact on the imaginative realm of film since its very early days. Almost every film about the Bible since The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ produced by Pathé in 1902 refers to his illustrations, and every film adaptation of Dante or Don Quixote has used him as a model, from Georg Wilhelm Pabst and Orson Welles to Terry Gilliam. All films dealing with life in London in the Victorian era by directors ranging from David Lean, to Roman Polanski and Tim Burton draw on the visions in London: a pilgrimage for their sets. A large number of dream fantastical or phantasmagorical scenes take their inspiration from Doré’s graphic world, beginning with Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon in 1902. In the realm of cartoons and animation, Walt Disney owes a huge debt to Doré. Doré primal forests, from Atala in particular, were also used in the various versions of King Kong from 1933 to the 2005 film by Peter Jackson, who had already drawn on Doré for The Lord of the Rings. Jean Cocteau was also indebted to the illustrations for Perrault’s Fairy Tales for his Beauty and the Beast (1945), as was George Lucas for the character Chewbacca in Star Wars (1977). This chapter of the exhibition catalogue “Gustave Doré: Master of Imagination” (Musée d’Orsay in Paris and National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa), which take shape in film excerpts “hanging” next to the works, shows how the silver screen has etched Doré into the 20th century imagination.