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an old handwritten letter with a picture of a bird on it
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334 - Jean COCTEAU. Signed autograph manuscript, *Présidence fantô…
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Estimate €1,000 - €1,500
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Description
Jean COCTEAU. Signed autograph manuscript, *Présidence fantôme*, [May 1956]; 4½ pages, quarto. On Clouzot’s film *Le Mystère Picasso*. Manuscript with deletions and corrections of the article published in *Les Lettres Françaises* (10 May 1956) concerning Henri-Georges Clouzot’s film about Pablo Picasso, *Le Mystère Picasso*, which was screened at the 9th Cannes Film Festival on 2 May 1956, where it was unanimously awarded the Special Jury Prize. In a short introductory text written by Cocteau in the third person, he states that he was unable to attend the screening, despite having been appointed Honorary President of the Festival, but that he wished to ‘write a few lines about this exceptional work ‘We know Picasso’s reply when asked, “Why don’t you go to New York? They’d build you a golden bridge there” – “And I’d sleep underneath it”. […] This is how gypsies live; this is how a painter lives, whose ideas gush forth like water from a watering can and who fills his homes with nothing but the furnishings of his genius’. Cocteau received a telegram from Cannes from his friends ‘Pablo, Georges and Georges’ [Picasso, Clouzot and Auric, who composed the film’s score], in which they raised a glass to their friendship: for Cocteau, this was further proof that ‘time is merely a phenomenon of perspective, does not in fact exist, and that the heart always reigns supreme in a group where Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire rejoice alongside us, just as they did in the Montparnasse of our youth’. He recalls the screening at which Picasso and Clouzot showed him the film: ‘I shall never forget the vast, shadowy hall—brighter and more alive than the Croisette—where a bullfight was taking place between Picasso and the void, the canvas, the paper, the ink, the inert forces that rage against those who know how to conquer death. Is not the affliction of our age that, whereas artists once worked to give life, they now work to forget life? With Picasso, nothing of the sort—or perhaps it is that he seeks to forget through a creative frenzy’… He is not seeking to replace the critics: ‘Since I am now a phantom president, it was a matter of replying to the telegram from my three friends and apologising for the circumstances that prevented me from taking my seat in their box to pay a fraternal tribute to their work’.
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About the sale Letters and Autograph Manuscripts – Part II
Auction location
Auction time 10/14/2026 at 2:00 PM
Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
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