The Centre Pompidou holds another notable photograph from this same sitting, inventoried under no. AM 2012-6112, but dated 1939; the manuscript annotation on our print, contemporary with the photograph, almost certainly warrants correcting that date. Trained by François Kollar, a member of the AEAR, who worked as a reporter in Spain before becoming the official portraitist for the Denoël and Steel publishing houses, André Papillon was a discreet photographer, but one with a sure and well-regarded technique. This fine portrait shows the poet posing before a wrought-iron sculpture representing a great fantastical bird, which one might be tempted to read, within Cocteau’s own universe, as a heraldic cock — a possible allusion to Le Coq et l’Arlequin — its silhouette extending, as if in negative, the very profile of the poet.
A very fine print.
From the Max-Pol Fouchet collection.