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Pablo PICASSO & Moïse KISLING & Manuel Ortiz de ZARATE & Max JACOB & PAQUERETTE

Jean COCTEAU

Photographie originale probablement unique de Pablo Picasso à Montparnasse devant le café La Rotonde, le 12 août 1916

Paris 12 août 1916, 6,3x8,6cm, une feuille.

Original photograph likely unique taken by Jean Cocteau showing Pablo Picasso and C^o in Montparnasse in front of the café La Rotonde, the 12 August 1916
 

Original photograph by Jean Cocteau taken on 12 August 1916, showing Manuel Ortiz de Zárate, Moïse Kisling, Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso and the model Pâquerette, his girlfriend at the time, posing in front of the famous café La Rotonde on Boulevard du Montparnasse in Paris.
 
Contemporary silver print, probably unique, from Jean Cocteau's personal archives then the Maurice Sachs collection.
 
This image was published in Billy Klüver's book entitled A day with Picasso: twenty-four photographs by Jean Cocteau (1997). However, Klüver states that he didn't know the original photograph and used a modern reprint from the negative in the Cocteau archives for his work. We have not found any other copy of our original photograph in international public collections.
Billy Klüver has assembled and commented on the twenty-one photographs taken by Jean Cocteau on 12 August 1916 in Montparnasse, close to this intersection of the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard du Montparnasse, which was named Place Pablo-Picasso in 1994. They take us to the café La Rotonde, before which a beaming Picasso in a cap speaks with Max Jacob whose baldness shines in the sun, behind them Henri-Pierre Roché in uniform and Manuel Ortiz de Zarate, sit at a table on the terrace of the same café where Pablo is next to the glowing Pâquerette and the young Polish painter Moïse Kisling. Pâquerette, with her hair in a headband, a chic dress, is the queen of the encounter. [...] It's the relaxed life at the back. Pâquerette, or rather Émilienne Pâquerette Geslot, was then a star model of the fashion designer Poiret who was all the rage at the time. A real one-day film of Picasso outside of his studio.” (Pierre Daix, Picasso) In his book, Klüver questions the presence of all these artistic authorities in the making in a Paris that is deserted by war. The answer is, according to him, to search in the direction of the Salon d'Antin, an exhibition organized by André Salmon in July 1916, in which all the protagonists of our photograph took part, with the exception of Pâquerette. It is also on this occasion that Picasso reveals his Demoiselles d'Avignon to the public.
 
This extremely rare image, taken by Jean Cocteau with his mother's Kodak camera, immortalizes a moment of joy that depicts the artistic all-Montparnasse of the early 20th century.
 
Provenance: Jean Cocteau's personal archives then the Maurice Sachs collection and Max-Philippe Delatte.