COCTEAU'S TWIN

Before Nathan Fielder there was A Day With Picasso

While researching the life of Kiki de Montparnasse, a researcher finds a handful of snapshots of Picasso and his friends hanging around their neighborhood, bouncing from café to café. Over the course of several years, he collects all twenty-four photographs taken that day, sequences them, identifies the exact date they were taken—August 12, 1916—and the photographer: the artist Jean Cocteau, who was using up four rolls of film he had left over from documenting the Belgian front.

Occasionally one comes across a book of nonfiction that feels like fiction, a hoax, fiction posing as a hoax, or perhaps the other way around.¹ A Day with Picasso is none of those things. Rather, this slim hardcover published by MIT Press in 1996 is an earnest work of historical research.

Written by Billy Klüver,² its ninety-nine pages clack by with the officiousness of J.G. Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, dispassionately detailing the lengths Klüver went to, over the course of several decades, to reconstruct the order and minute circumstances surrounding these photographs. He consults weather maps. He measures shadows. He talks to mathematicians. He argues convincingly that Picasso is holding Cocteau’s cane so Cocteau can handle the camera. (Picasso never carried one; Cocteau was mocked for doing so.) The result, perhaps even more relatable now than when the book was published, is like Cocteau’s Instagram grid—circa the Great War—delivered here, to a time when the quotidian has attained equal footing with the  sublime. (Cf. the current exhibition of early Paul McCartney snapshots at the Brooklyn Museum.)

A typical entry, appended to the fourth photograph in the series:

No. 4.  Position B. Close to 1:00. The group has moved five meters to the right. Picasso stretches out his arm to welcome Marie Wassilieff. He is carrying a torn-open envelope and a cane and has a watch in the breast pocket of his jacket. Roché and Jacob have a lot of stuff in their pockets. The arch, the low wall,  and the railing of the entrance to the Vavin Métro station can be seen behind them. In the lunette under-neath the “La Rotonde” sign at the entrance to the cafe there is an advertisement for Cinzano 

Simone de Beauvoir, then eight years old, lived with her family in the apartment above the Rotonde  whose windows appear in the photograph. She remembers: “Underneath our flat, opposite the peaceful  Dôme where Monsieur Dardelle played domınoes, a rowdy café had just opened, called La Rotonde. You could see short-cropped, heavily made up women going in and curiously dressed men.”

Among photographs of Picasso taken up to this time, these are unusual in that he is actually smiling.

While the images themselves are somewhat interesting, it is the apparatus that really captivates. With chapter headings like “Dating and Timing the Photographs” and “The Camera and the Film”—and procedural prose like the passage above, with its conjuring of an absent Simone de Beauvoir—A Day with Picasso exceeds itself as a book about art and becomes a work of art itself, something Georges Perec might have written or something Nathan Fielder could have mined for the pseudo-scientific conceits of The Rehearsal.

1. Lawrence Weshler’s Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders, about the Museum of Jurassic Technology, comes to mind.

2. Klüver himself is a remarkable character, a Monaco-born Bell Labs engineer who collaborated most famously with Jean Tinguely on his self-destructing sculpture Homage to New York.