SPLENDID FOLIO VOLUME OF HUGO’S DESIGNS FOR COCTEAU’S ROMÉO ET JULIETTE, WITH 19 WONDERFUL HAND-COLORED ILLUSTRATIONS OF SETS AND COSTUMES, ONE OF ONLY 420 COPIES

(HUGO, Jean) COCTEAU, Jean. Roméo et Juliette, Prétexte a Mise en Scène par Jean Cocteau, d’après le Drame de William Shakespeare. Décors et Costumes de Jean Hugo. Paris: Sans Pareil, 1926. Folio, original pale blue-green paper wrappers, uncut, original olive paper chemise, green silk ties. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

Limited first edition, number 414 of only 420 copies, of Cocteau’s surrealistic version of Roméo et Juliette, with 12 wonderful full-page hand-colored costume designs by Jean Hugo and seven stage sets as headpieces. A handsome and important contribution to the history of modern art and dance.

Gifted painter and member of the 1920s French Surrealist movement, Jean Hugo is widely recognized for his contributions to graphics and stage design and his unique style of painting. He was the great grandson of Victor Hugo and “like his famous ancestor, he, for his generation, was one of the avant-garde. Jean Hugo was a part of the revolution in theater, poetry, music and dance after World War I” (John Andrew Frey). In 1921 he designed masks and costumes for Rolf de Maré’s Swedish ballet production of Jean Cocteau’s Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel. Cocteau’s artistic influence, together with Diaghilev’s radical and provocative choreography, helped to revitalize ballet in France and laid the framework for modern interpretive dance. Cocteau’s Roméo et Juliette, however, while it depended largely upon the choreographic movement of characters on the stage, is not strictly a ballet, but rather what Cocteau called “an excuse for a stage production.” It was the first of his “textes-prétextes,” a form of play that he hoped would “save the French theater at whatever cost” (Crosland, 79). “Hugo designed a set whose hangings and floor would be of black cloth with colored linear decorations, and for the actors black tights and black velvet dresses, doublets and short hose, painted with ‘embroidery’ that would be picked out by lighting… ‘Red lights framing the stage,’ [Cocteau recalled], ‘kept the audience from seeing anything else” (Steegmuller, 328). Text in French.

Light wear to chemise. Folio beautiful and fine. An exceptional production.