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an old handwritten letter from a man who is writing on a piece of paper
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335 - Jean COCTEAU. Signed autograph manuscript, *L’Anniversaire d…
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Estimate €1,000 - €1,500
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Description
Jean COCTEAU. Signed autograph manuscript, *L’Anniversaire des Mamelles de Tirésias*, [June 1957]; 8 pages, in-4. A tribute to Guillaume Apollinaire, marking the 40th anniversary of his play *Les Mamelles de Tirésias*, published in the newspaper *Les Lettres françaises* (27 June 1957). Cocteau recalls the unforgettable premiere of the play (24 June 1917 at the Conservatoire Renée Maubel) and celebrates the freedom and unblemished modernity of this mischievous, surrealist farce, highlighting the explosive atmosphere of that memorable performance and its rebellion against the prevailing Cubism. ‘A painting in a museum or exhibition is always a sort of hanged man. […] The matinee of *Les Mamelles* remains unforgettable to us […]. How could I ever forget that set by Vlaminck, of grandiose simplicity, with its naked lady in an aquarium amidst the wrapping paper, its little widows, and, hanging from the rafters, the legs of the aviators dangling into the void? Such was the dogma that governed our Montparnasse group, that this spectacle at Les Mamelles presented a frivolous disorder, a grave disobedience to Aristotle’s rules of Cubism”… Serge Férat, with Apollinaire’s support, had done away with the bottle of aniseed liqueur, the pipe, the guitar and the newspaper—motifs so dear to the Cubists. ‘In an exquisite foreshadowing of the managers of *Parade*, he had decked out the actors in finery reminiscent of that found at the newsstand, the poster columns and the red balloon seller. I was, as I recall, on the left-hand side of the forestage, and Guillaume […] had asked me for a poem for the programme. […] Apollinaire and I were given a rough ride, and after the performance, we were given a hard time by judges who didn’t smile in the slightest. Apollinaire was thus guilty of having taken liberties with a discipline with which Juan Gris had punished his youth as a caricaturist, and I was accused of having brought the word ‘street’ into a poem by the painter who declared, ‘I have introduced the siphon into painting’. We loved Gris; we respected that olive-hued severity with which he countered the multicoloured fervour of the Fauves, but we knew him to be rather naïve, […] he reduced the objects on a table to the bare minimum, objects that Picasso would soon sweep away in his whirlwind. *Les Mamelles de Tirésias* was, before *Le Bœuf sur le toit* and *Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel*, the first deliberately anarchist performance; I was about to say the first act of liberation by a poet who could no longer bear the aridity that precluded surprise: the mechanical rabbit playing the drum, which he had made […] the symbol of non-conformism. Shortly before his death, Apollinaire spoke to me bitterly of this carcass stripped of flesh. His eroticism, that of a gluttonous monk, lamented the thankless path taken by painters. His *The Breasts of Tiresias* are […] a revolt against a cult – an inevitable revolt amongst young people whose injustice condemns everything it dreams of replacing’.
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About the sale Letters and Autograph Manuscripts – Part II
Auction location
Auction time 10/14/2026 at 2:00 PM
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