1930
Illustration from The White Book
This drawing shows two torsos joined at the belly button, with facial profiles detached and turned, such that they do not flow from the bodies, but are linked by a line extending between the eye of the face in the lower left corner and that in the upper right. The image is from the 1930 edition of The White Book, a combination of autobiography and fiction exploring homosexuality which featured seventeen drawings accompanying the text. The text traces the erotic awakening of a young boy, while the images center upon anonymous male bodies. The narrator cannot be clearly linked to any of the figures, who are notably fragmentary, often rendered without hands or feet and with grey patches obscuring their genitalia, alongside a text in which Cocteau does not refer to the penis by name, instead using euphemisms ranging from "an enigma" to "that little underwater plant."
The book's central image shows the outline of two men, in similar postures, pressing their bodies on alternate sides of a mirror. The illustrations before and after this center similarly correspond, such that the book itself foregrounds doubling; the above illustration, also, with its doubled torso and multiple faces, suggests sexual eroticism springs, in part, from the allure of the mirror. The images are colored with soft pink, pale blue, dark grey and beige, though the colors do not correspond with reality, with some bodies left uncolored while others are blue or pink.
The White Book borrows, for its title, a phrase used to designate a set of official documents addressing a problem, as homosexuality was undeniably seen at this time; the word 'white,' however, has connotations of innocence, suggesting that the book operates essentially as a defense, as is supported by Cocteau's argument, in the text, that his "misfortunes stem from a society that condemns the rare as a crime and forces us to reform our inclinations." Cocteau's simultaneous avowal and disavowal of the text's authorship is in keeping with the tone adopted by the book, which celebrates homosexuality whilst accepting the inability to speak of it openly, as hinted at by the anonymity of most partners mentioned in the text and by a drawing of two men blindfolded. The centrality of the mirror image links The White Book with Cocteau's broader oeuvre, in which he frequently deployed mirrors to signify passage into the unknown. The colors used for the illustrations, in 1930, are clearly influenced by Cocteau's friend Marie Laurencin, known for working in a similar palette, while the fluid lines and abstraction of the figures show Picasso's influence. Cocteau revised the illustrations as his sexuality shifted; while the bodies drawn in 1930 are fragile and graceful, those accompanying the 1947 edition celebrate strength and virility, with far more explicit depictions of sexual acts.
