Jean COCTEAU. Signed autograph manuscript, *L’Anniversaire d - Lot 335

Lot n° 335
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1000 - 1500 EUR
Jean COCTEAU. Signed autograph manuscript, *L’Anniversaire d - Lot 335
Jean COCTEAU. Signed autograph manuscript, *L’Anniversaire des Mamelles de Tirésias*, [June 1957]; 8 pages, in-4. A tribute to Guillaume Apollinaire, celebrating the 40th anniversary of his play *Les Mamelles de Tirésias*, published in the newspaper *Les Lettres françaises* (June 27, 1957). Cocteau recalls the unforgettable premiere of the play (June 24, 1917, at the Renée Maubel Conservatory) and celebrates the freedom and unspoiled modernity of this mischievous, surrealist farce, highlighting the explosive atmosphere of that memorable performance and its rebellion against the prevailing Cubist trend. “A painting in a museum or exhibition is always a sort of hanged man. […] The matinee performance of *Les Mamelles* remains unforgettable to us […]. How could I ever forget that set by Vlaminck, of grandiose simplicity, with its naked woman in an aquarium amid packing paper, its little widows, and, hanging from the rafters, the aviators’ legs dangling into the void? Such was the dogma that governed our Montparnasse group: that this spectacle at *Les Mamelles* presented a frivolous disorder, a grave disobedience to Aristotle’s rules of Cubism”… Serge Férat, with Apollinaire’s support, had done away with the bottle of anise liqueur, the pipe, the guitar, and the newspaper—motifs so dear to the Cubists. “In an exquisite foreshadowing of the managers of *Parade*, he had outfitted the actors with charms similar to those of the newsstand, the columns of posters, and the vendor of red balloons. I was, as I recall, on the left side of the proscenium, and Guillaume […] had asked me for a poem for the program. […] Apollinaire and I got a thorough dressing-down, and after the show, we were roughed up by judges who didn’t smile in the least. Apollinaire was thus guilty of taking liberties with a discipline with which Juan Gris had punished his youth as a caricaturist, and I was accused of having brought the word “street” into a poem by the painter who declared, “I introduced the siphon into painting.” We loved Gris; we respected that olive-hued severity he set against the multicolored fervor of the Fauves, but we knew him to be quite naïve, […] he reduced the objects on a table to the bare minimum—objects that Picasso would soon sweep away in his whirlwind. *Les Mamelles de Tirésias* was, before *Le Bœuf sur le toit* and *Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel*, the first deliberately anarchist performance—I was about to say the first act of liberation by a poet who could no longer bear the aridity that excluded surprise: the mechanical rabbit playing the drum, which he had made […] the symbol of nonconformity. Shortly before his death, Apollinaire spoke to me bitterly of this carcass stripped of flesh. His eroticism, that of a gluttonous monk, lamented the ungrateful path taken by painters. His *The Breasts of Tiresias* are […] a revolt against a cult—an inevitable revolt among young people whose sense of injustice condemns everything it dreams of replacing.”
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