Le mystère laïc

First edition, one of 100 copies specially printed on a quarto format (in-4 couronne), ours one of 64 numbered copies on annam de rives paper.

Two faint dampstains to the spine, internally in attractive condition.

Illustrated with 5 drawings by Giorgio de Chirico.

As stated in the limitation, our copy does indeed contain the two original etchings by Giorgio de Chirico, each signed and numbered by him in pencil.

When Giorgio de Chirico returned to Paris in 1925, Jean Cocteau began to express his interest in the inventor of Metaphysical painting. De Chirico was then embarking upon a new manner of painting and exhibited his recent canvases at the Galerie Léonce Rosenberg. He soon became the target of enraged Surrealists, who organised a counter-exhibition of De Chirico's"'metaphysical' paintings they owned, in a small shop they had opened on rue Jacques-Callot, while [Louis] Aragon wrote the text of a catalogue-preface excommunicating the painter’s new manner for the sole benefit of the 'metaphysical' paintings. In the window of their gallery, they displayed a parody of the paintings entitled 'Meubles en plein air' [Furniture in the Open Air]." (Jean Cocteau, L'homme et les miroirs).

Cocteau was himself ostracised by the Surrealists and came to the painter's defence with this essay accompanied by five of De Chirico's drawings: "From this admiration for De Chirico arose a small book, Le Mystère laïc, a series of aphorisms on painting, Picasso, Bérard and, foremost among them, Chirico. It was published in 1928 by Editions des Quatre-Chemins, overseen by Maurice Sachs [...] After the essay on Picasso, published in 1923, this is the book in which Cocteau deals most directly with painting. Yet here, as with Picasso, he approaches it more as a poet than as a painter." (ibid.)

The painter of mystery was greatly discomfited to see his secrets laid bare - for few artists relish having their work discussed. Regarding Le Mystère laïc, de Chirico would later write in his memoirs written in 1945: "I am deeply grateful to Jean Cocteau for the interest he showed in me, but I must say that I do not in the least approve of the kind of praise he bestows upon me, nor of the explanation he seeks to give of my paintings." A reading imbued with poetry, certainly, but one that doubtless departed from the artist's intentions; he was irritated "to find himself described, between the lines, as a 'maniac' or, more directly, as a 'monster of naïveté'," as Joël Roucloux observes (L'oracle et l'énigme. Cocteau peintre de de Chirico).

Nevertheless, Cocteau produced some immortal lines highlighting de Chirico's affinity with Greece and the innovative nature of his metaphysical objects, while predicting, well before Marcel Duchamp, the future rehabilitation of de Chirico's work:

"We live at the centre of a rose window of circumstances whose overall design human infirmity prevents us from grasping at a single glance. Thus, one particular order of motifs will always prevail over another, but that does not mean that we shall ultimately find beautiful and good that which triumphs, and ugly and evil that which is defeated [...]".

A superb copy of this critical essay cast as a prose poem, and masterly ode to the painter of the "secular mystery" both deified and reviled by the Surrealists.