[6][7] He enlisted as a private and served in Morocco, where he discovered "Arab architecture, Muslim interlacing, earthenware panels with floral decoration, the colorful shadows dear to Delacroix and the sumptuous contrasts of tones that had so seduced Matisse.
[9] In New York, he met with other artists and intellectuals who had fled France, including Jules Romains, André Maurois, Saint-John Perse, Fernand Léger, Salvador Dalí, and Amédée Ozenfant.
The Legion of Honor museum, an institution with close cultural ties to France, staged a major exhibit, resulting in the illustrated catalogue Jean de Botton: Retrospective (1944).
[14] Less successful was his collaboration with the San Francisco Ballet, The Triumph of Hope, set to music by César Franck and staged at the War Memorial Opera House with a full orchestra and fifty dancers.
De Botton designed the costumes and backdrops and wrote the libretto,[6] an homage to the shared values of America and France, "couched...in abstract language and high-flown rhetoric," with dancers portraying archetypes including "Man, Woman, the Child Hope, Satan, and personifications of the forces of good and evil...Wartime shortages cramped the production's style," diminishing the grand theatrical effects conceived by de Botton.
One critic at least was entertained, writing that "Satan...triumphed in the matter of providing excitement and holding interest, for the handsome and agile demon...directed one of the most wondrous orgies ever staged at the Opera.
And since music is, in essence, a subjective and abstract art, that rejects imitation and description, it is logical that the canvases that proceed from it are anti-naturalist, that they draw the viewer into the realm of dreams and fantasy.
[17] "What makes de Botton important," the British critic Eric Newton wrote, are his hitherto undiscovered harmonies of color...a complex chord of colour that takes incredible risks and yet is always triumphant.
Jean de Botton can dance on the very edge of the precipice with his daring juxtapositions of colour that are never simple, never obvious, always gay, yet always a little surprising....One trembles to see him taking such risks, yet he never makes a false step....He is a poet of hope, not of despair.
[18]In the 1950s and 1960s de Botton became an international artist, with exhibitions in the United States including Philadelphia, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Phoenix, Atlanta, Fort Worth, Palm Beach, Dallas, the University of Maine, and Adelphi University; in Europe, including London, Geneva, Osnabrück, Hamm, Cologne, Salzburg, Munich, Vienna, Monaco, Nice, and Paris.
[12][19] His paintings were collected by Ernest Hemingway, Queen Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill, Jules Romains, Paul Valéry, and Charlie Chaplin.
"[21] The timing of the 2021 auction took advantage of a flurry of interest in Josephine Baker in the French press as she was about to be honored by the symbolic reburial of her remains at the Panthéon in Paris.
The success of the auction "pays homage to the painter and restores the artist to the height of his notoriety," and the "portrait presents itself more than ever as a manifesto of freedom, still relevant today.