COCTEAU Jean

Lot 36
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Estimation :
5000 - 6000 EUR
COCTEAU Jean
Autograph MANUSCRIT,[La Jeunesse et le Scandale, 1925]; 76 pages of a small in-4 notebook (22 x 17 cm), in black ink on lined paper, brown canvas back and cardboard covers (back a little used). Conference on avant-garde art and artistic scandals. Cocteau gave this lecture at the University of the Annals on February 27, 1925. The musical accompaniment was provided by Marcelle Meyer and Jean Wiéner. The text was collected in Volume IX of the Complete Works (Marguerat). The manuscript contains erasures and corrections; it is usually written on the front of the sheets, with occasional additions on the opposite page. On the title page, pen and ink drawing (sketch of a face in profile). Cocteau comments in particular on his collaboration with musicians, such as Parade with Érik SATIE, or Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel with the Groupe des Six, evoking STRAVINSKY and Le Sacre du Printemps, or the music of American jazz bands... Cocteau, who is addressing here a young audience to whom he refuses to give a course, explains that he can only offer his own experience as a showman to reflect on what causes scandal or not, voluntarily or not. Affirming that true beauty is in itself scandalous since it constantly changes the rules of the game, he says he seeks laughter at the new beauty that can be recognized by its blue eyes and that "gives souls worthy of facing it a delicious nausea, a kind of shock [...] between the vertigo of love and death. Beware of the baroque, the picturesque, the too visible originality that paints the old fabric instead of changing the fabric [...]...] After the excesses of a way of romanticism, of barbarism, succeeding as always, as opposed to the flickering and soft graces of impressionism, to recreate a new order rich in the teachings of decadence, the impressionist Capua and the violence that crushed it, and to restore to our enriched, shaken, brutalized spirit a wise mould without which France could never live, rich in teachings
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