COCTEAU Jean (1889-1963)

Henri Matisse, autograph manuscript signed, Milly August 1949; 16 pages in-4. Beautiful tribute to Matisse, partly unpublished. This text on Matisse, also evoking Pablo Picasso, written in August 1949, does not seem to have been published at the time; a shorter version will be published in the review Livres de France in October 1955 (text taken up again in the Cahiers Jean Cocteau, n° 9, 1981, p. 179-182) The manuscript is written in blue ballpoint pen (except for page 12 added in pencil), with numerous erasures, corrections and additions in pencil; it presents several unpublished paragraphs, and variants in relation to the published text. "Matisse is one of the most significant glories of France because he opposes the type of intellectual that dominates the arts in our country. He makes the gift, so decried at the present time, a perfect enterprise". Cocteau quotes Guillaume Apollinaire who, "in the preface to the exhibition catalogue Matisse, Picasso chez Paul Guillaume compares him to an exploded orange. Spots and lines, his hand rests like a base stone. [...] Matisse, according to Picasso's beautiful phrase, first finds and then seeks, that is his great marvel. [...] Never was a freer hand put at the service of such a young mind. Never has such wealth fallen into more thrifty hands. Never will you have a more shining example of the immediate control of instinct." Cocteau recalls the set for Strawinsky's The Nightingale at Diaghilev's: "One might have expected a jungle of colours. It was not so. The curtain rose on a pale blue void organised by that taste which is the opposite of good taste and which surprises by dint of being simple". Cocteau reiterates his deep admiration for Matisse and Picasso: "they paint at the opposite ends of the spectrum - except in terms of simplicity and the total absence of silliness. One projects seeds, the other combines grafts. One disrupts the traffic without malice. The other is a disrupter of trafi c and meditates on its accidents." Matisse's genius is evident and "Matisse, like all geniuses, is a murderer. He is surrounded by the nimbus with which assassins halo themselves. He reigns by divine grace, by who knows what privilege of the soul" like "gold that no one imitates and which exercises a mysterious domination". About color: "It seems that Matisse waters a canvas and that the colors grow on it. The sun finishes the job. It could be that in a collection of Matisse's works, the exhibition rooms would be filled with the scent of the sun. Cocteau tries to define abstract painting: "It seems inconceivable since abstraction ceases to be so the minute it is represented. [...] At the antipodes of each other, Matisse and Picasso push realism to the point where abstraction cannot be questioned. He does not dare to tackle the technical side, which seems to him to be a struggle against the inert object: "I suppose that Matisse enters into a struggle with the materials he uses to paint [...] Genius consists in effacing the traces of this struggle the second it breaks out. He shows again the differences between Picasso and Matisse in their representation of the couple and concludes: "Few men have had such a determination to put themselves in the forefront, to expose themselves, to commit themselves to the limit of possibility. There remains only failure to counterbalance too much success and to cross the zone of shadow where the heroes bathe, become invulnerable and ensure their immortality".