Jean Cocteau Libri

Dominique Paini was chief curator of the Cocteau exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. This English edition makes available to English readers its important essays by seventeen French authors, including several who knew Cocteau personally.

Portraits, scenes, literary figures, etc., all rendered with grace and wit. 129 drawings.

“Discomfort is the hallmark of the poet. His world is almost uninhabitable. People sense this. They enter it as little as possible, as quickly as possible, and only out of curiosity.” Widely celebrated for his work in the fields of literature, cinema, and the visual arts, Jean Cocteau was one of the twentieth century’s outstanding creative practitioners. In this collection of brief—often aphoristic—meditations, Jean Cocteau reflects on the fundamental solitariness of the artistic vocation. As well as offering fascinating insights into Cocteau’s own achievements, Secrets of Beauty is a moving testament to the artist’s need and obligation to pursue an independent path, and to the disjunction between art and “the inflexible everyday world”. Juliet Powys’s translation skilfully captures the wit and subtlety of the original French text—a vital contribution to aesthetic theory that deserves to be read as a significant work of literature in its own right.

Although better known for his poetry, films and novels, Jean Cocteau experimented with drawing from childhood, and his caricatures have become iconic of his unique vision of people and life. This collection of erotic drawings covers four decades of work.

Personalities of actors, technical problems and their surmounting, daily events, much more. 38 photographs.

Illustrations of Leon Bakst's stage sets and costumes for the Ballet Russes accompany synopses of the plays by Cocteau for which they were designed.Reprint of the 1913 edition. Showcases the costumes, set designs, and paintings of Leon Bakst, the designer for the Ballets Russes. Notes on the ballets by Jean Cocteau. 53 pages, with 38 additional leaves of illustrationsTranslated from the French.

Le Livre Blanc, a `white paper' on homosexual love, was first published anonymously in France by Cocteau's contemporary Maurice Sachs and was at once decried as by the critics as obscene. The semi-autobiographical narrative describes a youth's love affairs with a succession of boys and men during the 1900s.