Word: cocteau
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ring the bell again a year later." For Italy's Egidio Costantini, a balding man in his 50s, this persistent bell ringing has opened the doors of some of the world's most renowned artists-Oskar Kokoschka, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Luis Fontana, Yves Klein, Jean Cocteau, Picasso. No avid autograph seeker nor voracious collector, Costantini is a contemporary Venetian visionary out to restore the grandeur that was glass four centuries ago (see color...
Spring, 1917. World War I ground grimly on. All the same, the famed impresario of the Ballet Russe, Sergei Diaghilev, commissioned a young poet, Jean Cocteau, to conceive a new ballet. At the time Cocteau was obsessed by visual images, especially the Harlequins, Pierrots and musical instruments in Picasso's paintings. As Cocteau recalled later, "My dream was to hear the music of Picasso's guitars," and he set about building his ballet around them, hoping to cajole the Spanish painter into designing sets and costumes. Picasso, a friend of Cocteau's, was cajoled...
...play achieve an astonishingly tender tension between sickness and sweetness. The boy (Michael Warren Powell) and girl (Joanna Miles) live in a fantasy playroom of imaginary companions and real toys, such as a miniature Ferris wheel. The atmosphere has a suffocating intimacy, an airless immunity to reality that recalls Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles, with its similarly incestuous relationship. Reality finally intrudes with cruel pathos as the girl's birth pangs become her death throes...
Moreau stayed in The Dazzling Hour for two years, then moved on to other shows-Cocteau's La Machine Infernale (in which she appeared with her hair dusted with silver powder, her hands in clawed gloves, and her body covered with a flesh-colored net) and, for two years, Shaw's Pygmalion. She had already begun taking parts in small films, shooting all day, then racing to the theater for the show at night. The word was that Moreau was completely unphotogenic-the nose and ears too small, the mouth too thick, the body nothing special...
Almost instantly she revealed her gen ius for attracting mates and mentors, occasionally overlapping. In London, it was Herbert Read who made out her shopping list. In Paris, it was Marcel Duchamp who galloped her around the studios, introducing her to such greats as Arp, Kandinsky and Jean Cocteau, while Peggy made good her resolve "to buy a painting a day." Dynamite Chronicle. Their advice proved good. When Peggy fled from Vichy France in 1941 for New York, she went encumbered with her future husband, Surrealist Max Ernst, her ex-husband, Laurence Vail, and art that had cost her only...