A collection of memorabilia of the French 20th century writer and artist Jean Cocteau, including letters to his partner, the actor Jean Marais, went on sale in Paris yesterday.
Cocteau, who died in 1963, collaborated with artists ranging from the composers Igor Stravinsky and Eric Satie to Pablo Picasso and the ballet impresario Sergey Diaghilev, carving a distinctive place in French art and writing.
His works range from novels such as Les Enfants Terribles to portraits, advertising commissions, theatre sets and cinema.
Many of the lots, which came from Marais' Paris apartment and house on the Riviera, testify to the close relationship between the two men, including correspondence and a number of Cocteau's sketches and portraits of the actor.
The collection attracted a crowd of viewers ahead of the sale, many of whom had a personal association with Marais.
The French poet, writer, artist and film maker Jean Maurice Eugene Clement Cocteau was born to a wealthy family in 1889 in a small town near Paris, France. His father committed suicide when he was about ten years old and Jean Cocteau entered a private school in 1900. In 1904 Cocteau was expelled from school and ran away to Marseilles where he lived in the "Red light district" under a false name until the police discovered him and returned him to his uncle's care. In 1908, Cocteau associated himself with Edouard de Max who was a famous tragedian of the Parisian stage at that time. Mr de Max encouraged Cocteau to write.
The following year Cocteau met the Russian impresario Sergey Daighilev who ran the Ballets Russes and Daighilev encouraged him to venture into the genre of ballet. Cocteau also met composer Igor Stravinsky and in 1914 he visited Stravinsky in Switzerland.
In 1917 Cocteau met Pablo Picasso and the following year he formed an intimate friendship with a 15-year-old novelist, Raymond Radiguet. Radiguet strongly influenced Cocteau's art and life but the young writer died from typhoid fever in 1923, dealing a severe blow to Cocteau and driving him to use opium.
Cocteau's first film, Blood of a Poet, was released in 1930 and in the early 1930s, Cocteau wrote what some believe is his greatest play, La Machine Infernal. During the next 15 years the artist's work lapsed possibly as a result of his recurring addiction to opium.
In 1945, Cocteau directed his adaptation of La Belle et la Bete (Beauty and the Beast), which marked a triumphant return of Cocteau to the screen and ten years later he was elected to the French Academy. In 1959 he made his last film as a director, The Testament of Orpheus which also features cameos from many celebrities including Pablo Picasso and Yul Brynner.
Jean Cocteau died of a heart attack at the age of 74 in France, in 1963, after hearing the news of the death of another friend, the singer Edith Piaf.