Signature Portrait

Is this a portrait? A cartoon? Or a signature? Answer: it's a bit of all three: a signaitoon. The wonderfully precocious Jean Cocteau drew this when he was just 21 years old for his older pal Eric Satie. Imagine having the chutzpah to hand someone this idiosyncratic sketch, confident that it would one day be worth big money! Perhaps it's surprising to think that the composer of those delicate Gymnopedies for piano was a Sigmund Freud look-alike. But he had looked somewhat wilder 10 years earlier, in 1900. Cocteau captured him making what was evidently a characteristic gesture, pinching his pince-nez, or spectacles, on to the bridge of his nose. It would have been instantly recognisable to friends of Satie. Picasso met Cocteau and his circle in 1917 and worked with them and Diaghilev on the ballet Parade, to Satie's music. Picasso duly did his own portrait of him in 1920. It's interesting to compare the two, because Picasso much later did signaitoons himself. But his came decades after Cocteau's. Everything Cocteau did had his imprint all over it, and he didn't change styles every few years, the way Picasso did. Cocteau's last hot love affair was with Jean Marais, and get him. His confidence over the Satie sketch was warranted, because Cocteau ended his days, not dying in the gutter like Modigliani, but wearing smart suits in a nice comfy chateau in the country.