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.