It seems to me a study of the pen-and-ink drawings and caricatures by the French artist Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), most easily available in the out-of-print but not-too-expensive used collections
Dessins (Drawings) and
Erotic Drawings by Jean Cocteau, could add something to the critical conversations surrounding cartooning as calligraphy (as per Ivan Brunetti and Lynda Barry), poetry and comics (as per critics Bill Randall and Gary Sullivan), cartooning and the continuous line (as evinced by the art of Saul Steinberg) and comics and queer studies (Cocteau was homosexual/bi).
Ironically, "comics" is practically the only medium in his lifetime in which Cocteau couldn't hang his hat, and even there, an argument could be made to add a hook for his chapeau. I first came to know of him via the film
La Belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1946), which he directed.[1]
(My guess is he's probably best known to contemporary U.S. audiences for that film and two others,
Orphée (Orpheus) and
Le sang d'un Poéte (The Blood of a Poet), for which the story was originally commissioned for animation, according to Annette Shandler Levitt's essay "The Cinematic Magic of Jean Cocteau" in
Reviewing Orpheus[2]).
I ended up writing my English final paper on Cocteau in high school: for that I read his poetry, studied his paintings and looked at photographs of his ceramics and murals. (Cocteau also wrote novels, plays and criticism, experimented with sound, did design work and managed pugilists. He also used any kind of material he could think of to draw with: "pipe cleaners, hairpins, candles, matches, thumbtacks, lumps of sugar, and stars made of pasta, among other things," according to the website "
A Gallery of Jean Cocteau".)
As part of the paper, we had to ground our discussions in the artistic movements concurrent with our subject's work, and since Cocteau's career ranged from the late-19th -to-mid 20th century, I had to provide a crash course in the philosophies behind Fauvism, Futurism, dada, Surrealism, Cubism and many more (Cocteau adamantly chose not to align with any one of them). The net result of all of this labor was a B+ and the material firmly planted in my brain.
As such, I see and hear Cocteau's words and works inadvertently echoed by various cartoonists. When Frank Quitely explains
in a Newsarama interview, "Like any other artist who isn't deliberately trying to ape someone else's style, my style is pretty much a mish-mash of many wide and varied influences […] that have impressed me over the course of my life, all channeled through my ‘default' drawing style — which is kind of the drawing equivalent of handwriting, y'know, what it keeps changing back into when you try to deliberately change it," I think of the Cocteau quotation (found on the "Gallery of Cocteau" website): "[Line] is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself felt above that of the model. ... It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies." [3]
I think of Cocteau's continuous line drawings when I see Saul Steinberg's (not that I'm saying the idea of continuous line drawing originated with either Cocteau or Steinberg; rather, I'm remarking that Cocteau was interested in a technique that would later be popularized in the U.S. via cartooning).
When Alison Bechdel mused in her
Comics Journal interview "I always liked that thing that people would say, you know, cartoonists are people who aren't really
great artists and aren't really
great writers. [
Laughs.] I think that's true. [
Emmert laughs.] I embrace that: but it fails to account for the fact that writing and drawing together is a completely other thing. I can be very good at that in a way that's just outside of the realm of reference of either just images or just words," I'm put in mind of Cocteau's dedication to Pablo Picasso in his collection
Drawings. "‘Poets don't draw. They untie handwriting and then knot it up again in a different way."
Cocteau's work in general is appealing and accessible, and his playful drawings are no exception. It's immensely pleasurable to wander your eyes across a man composed of curlicues, and then a few pages later another's strong eyes hit you like a force.
Though much has been written about his personal life and his body of works, it would be interesting to see what kind of light a consideration of an artist of whom it has been said "[his] drawings showed an intuitive affinity for line and a talent for suggesting mass through line alone, unaided by shading or halftones. Temperamentally, Cocteau was well suited to the speed, weightlessness, and flow of line, rather than to more static forms of image-making" [via the "Gallery of Cocteau website], could shine on the comics medium.
Notes
[1] Aesthetically, it's an achingly beautiful, must-see film for all ages, and readily available through public libraries and Netflix.
[2] Cornelia A. Tsakiridou, ed. Bucknell University Press, 1997.
[3] Another thing that might be interesting to study is the way in which the processes of drawing in general and cartooning specifically has been affected as people have technologically been moving away from handwriting and into typing.
Image credit:
Drawing from the Picasso dedication. ©1972 Dover Publications, Inc.
Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2008
