MAN RAY & JEAN COCTEAU - LE NUMÉRO BARBETTE

Photographs: Man Ray
Text: Jean Cocteau
Subject: Barbette
Publisher: Jacques Damase
Year: 1980 — text originally published 1926
Format: Hardcover, publisher’s boards
Dimensions: In-4, approx. 30 × 22 cm
Pages: 80
Language: French
Condition: Impeccable — no visible damage; exceptionally well preserved

Le Numéro Barbette is a seminal collaboration between Man Ray and Jean Cocteau, centered on the legendary performer Barbette and originally conceived in the context of the Parisian avant-garde of the 1920s.

Barbette, the American aerialist and gender-defying stage performer, became a remarkable figure within the artistic circles of interwar Paris. His performances deliberately unsettled conventional distinctions between masculine and feminine identity, using costume, gesture, transformation, and theatrical illusion as integral elements of the act. Through his fascination with performance and constructed identity, Barbette became an important subject for artists and writers associated with the avant-garde.

Man Ray’s photographs move between documentation and deliberate stylization, treating Barbette’s body and performance as material for photographic transformation. His images capture both the theatrical presence of the performer and the instability of the persona itself, allowing identity to appear as something constructed, performed, and continually transformed.

Cocteau’s accompanying text operates in parallel, transforming the stage act into a poetic meditation on illusion, identity, spectacle, and the relationship between performer and audience. Photography and literature converge to create a work in which Barbette becomes more than a documented performer: he emerges as a symbolic figure through which the boundaries between masculinity and femininity, reality and performance, and body and persona are deliberately destabilized.

The 1980 Jacques Damase edition preserves this important encounter between photography, poetry, and performance. Originally published in 1926, Le Numéro Barbette occupies a singular position within the history of European modernism and remains a particularly significant document of the avant-garde fascination with theatrical transformation and the photographic image.

A rare and highly collectible publication for collectors of Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Surrealism, avant-garde performance, and early twentieth-century photographic history.