COCTEAU Jean Original signed drawing, Self-portrait, 1935; India ink, 25.5 x 19.5 cm (framed). Beautiful self-portrait of the poet. It is signed and dated at the bottom right "John/1 May/1935/Welcome". The artist represented himself from the front, a scarf tied around his neck. This magnificent self-portrait was made in May 1935, when Jean Cocteau was staying alone at the Welcome Hotel in Villefranche-sur-Mer. He had previously spent a few weeks with his lover Marcel Khill in Antibes. The poet was then 45 years old. He had trouble concentrating on his work, trying to rest between two intense creative periods, and finally joined Marcel Khill in July for a cruise in the Mediterranean. Little appreciative of his appearance, Jean Cocteau never had any illusions about his physique, saying of him in La Difficulté d'être, in 1947: "I never had a beautiful face. Youth was my beauty. My bone structure is good. The flesh doesn't organize itself well on it. In addition, the skeleton changes over time and gets damaged. My nose, that I was right, is bustling"... Jean Cocteau's self-portraits are often stylised figures of himself. Here, it is the real man who pierces, without embellishments: Jean Cocteau put down the mask and showed us his true face, from which emerges an undeniable virility. A variant of this self-portrait is printed at the end of Portraitssouvenir (Grasset, 1935). Jean Cocteau exhibition, on the course of the century (Centre Georges Pompidou, 2003). Origin: André BERNARD collection.