Jean Cocteau and the French Scene

Fülszöveg

"There are as many Cocteaus as there are biographers of him," writes composer Ned Rorem in this strikingly illustrated book. Nineteen eighty-three, the year of the twentieth anniversary of the death of this supremely versatile artist, brought an outpouring of commemorative exhibitions, publications, performances, homages, and reassessments of this "mirror and victim of his time." His cre-adve life began in Proustian Paris and the dying embers of the fin de siecle; came to precocious maturity in the midst of the vanguard achievements and conflicts of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism; and actively continued throughout the next three decades. His associations and collaborations with everyone from Diaghilev and Stravinsky to Picasso, Satie, and Les Six remain as abidingly interesting as do his films and the protégés he discovered, Radiguet and Marais.
Cocteau remained an enfant terrible of the arts throughout his long life. He put in fifty years of hard labor in what film critic Stephen... Tovább

Fülszöveg

"There are as many Cocteaus as there are biographers of him," writes composer Ned Rorem in this strikingly illustrated book. Nineteen eighty-three, the year of the twentieth anniversary of the death of this supremely versatile artist, brought an outpouring of commemorative exhibitions, publications, performances, homages, and reassessments of this "mirror and victim of his time." His cre-adve life began in Proustian Paris and the dying embers of the fin de siecle; came to precocious maturity in the midst of the vanguard achievements and conflicts of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism; and actively continued throughout the next three decades. His associations and collaborations with everyone from Diaghilev and Stravinsky to Picasso, Satie, and Les Six remain as abidingly interesting as do his films and the protégés he discovered, Radiguet and Marais.
Cocteau remained an enfant terrible of the arts throughout his long life. He put in fifty years of hard labor in what film critic Stephen Harvey describes as "eight or nine of the seven lively arts." Poet, portraitist, painter, novelist, playwright, impresario, muralist, designer, and filmmaker, Cocteau was the greatest multimedia artist of his times. His collaborative spirit made him a catalyst for all the arts, just as his energy and wit made him a bridge between haut-monde Paris and the avant-garde of Montparnasse and Montmartre. His lust for attention and his talent for self-promotion led observers to call him "the most photographed man" in Paris—a fact admirably documented by this book.
In jean Cocteau and the French Scene, eight prominent French and American authors address Cocteau's incessant artistic activities. These trenchant essays relate the poet's kaleidoscopic talents to the larger canvas of the artisdc, literary, theatrical, musical, cinematic, and intellectual worlds in which he flourished. Francis Steegmuller, who received a Pulitzer
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