Jean Cocteau

gigatos | April 2, 2022

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Summary

Jean Cocteau, born on July 5, 1889 in Maisons-Laffitte and died on October 11, 1963 in Milly-la-Forêt, is a French poet, painter, designer, playwright and filmmaker.

Elected to the French Academy in 1955 and counting among the artists who have marked the twentieth century, he has rubbed shoulders with most of those who have animated the artistic life of his time. He was the impresario of his time, the trendsetter, the good genius of countless artists. Despite his literary works and artistic talents, Jean Cocteau always insisted that he was above all a poet and that all work is poetic.

Youth

Jean Cocteau, whose full name is Clément Eugène Jean Maurice Cocteau, was born on July 5, 1889, in the house of his maternal grandfather, place Sully in Maisons-Laffitte in a bourgeois family of Paris. His father, Georges Alfred Cocteau, born on July 8, 1842 in Melun, lawyer and amateur painter, and his mother, Marie Junia Émilie Eugénie Lecomte, born on September 21, 1855 in Maisons-Laffitte, were married on July 7, 1875 in the 9th district of Paris. His paternal grandfather, Athanase Cocteau (his maternal grandfather, Eugène Lecomte (his maternal uncle, Raymond Lecomte, diplomat.

His father, who lived on his income, commits suicide on April 5, 1898 in Paris. He has an older sister, Marthe (1877-1958) and an older brother, Paul (1881-1961). He discovers the theater and cinema at the age of six.

At the age of fifteen, Cocteau leaves the family cocoon to study at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris with, among others, the poisonous Pierre Dargelos who exerts a real fascination on him. Showing little interest in studies, he is expelled from the school for indiscipline in 1904 and fails his baccalaureate twice.

It is the tragedian Édouard de Max who first pays attention to him and, fascinated by his style, makes him known to the whole of Paris during a poetry matinee he organizes at the Femina theater with the first recital of the young Cocteau”s poetry.

He had a brief affair with Christiane Mancini, a student at the Conservatoire, in 1908.

He published his first collection of poems on his own account, La Lampe d”Aladin inspired by the Thousand and One Nights, in 1909 and became known in bohemian artistic circles as the “frivolous prince”. It was under this title that he published his second collection of poems in 1910. Edith Wharton described him as a man for whom “every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the base of the wonderful city…” He was also fascinated by the master of Russian ballet, Serge de Diaghilev and his principal artists, the painter Leon Bakst and the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. The meeting with Diaghilev, whom he wanted to astonish, marked the first crisis in Coctal”s creation: he renounced his collections of poems, which were rather pompous pastiches, and got closer to the Cubist and Futurist avant-garde.

From his collaboration with Russian artists were born The Blue God in 1912, with costumes and sets by Leon Bakst to music composed by Reynaldo Hahn, then Parade, a ballet produced in 1917 with costumes and sets by Pablo Picasso and music composed by Erik Satie. This work inspires Guillaume Apollinaire the neologism of surrealism, later taken up by André Breton and Philippe Soupault for the creation of this artistic movement, whose members quickly excluded Cocteau. He collaborates in the Dada movement and has a great influence on the work of others, in the very group composed by his musician friends, the Six, of which he becomes the spokesman.

Having been discharged from military service, Cocteau nevertheless decides to participate in the First World War as an ambulance driver with a civilian medical convoy. Adopted by a regiment of fusiliers marins, he lives in Dixmude, flies with Roland Garros but is quickly demobilized for health reasons. He returned to Paris and resumed his artistic activities. He also wrote the novel Thomas l”Imposteur about this war. In the 1920s, Cocteau joins literary circles around Marcel Proust, André Gide and Maurice Barrès.

In 1924, he wrote an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, which premiered in Paris at the Théâtre de La Cigale on June 2, 1924, with sets and costumes by Jean Hugo and music adapted from popular English tunes arranged and instrumented by Roger Désormière,

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Raymond Radiguet

In 1918, Max Jacob introduced him to the young poet Raymond Radiguet (1903-1923). He exerts on the short career of the latter a dominating influence: Jean Cocteau immediately guessed – “To what? I wonder,” he wrote later in The Difficulty of Being – a hidden talent. Enthused by the poems Radiguet read to him, Cocteau advised him, encouraged him and made him work; he then helped him publish his verses in avant-garde magazines, notably in SIC and Littérature.

The two men undertake many trips together and begin a romantic relationship. Still in awe of Radiguet”s literary talent, Cocteau promotes his friend”s work in his artistic circle and arranges for Grasset to publish Le Diable au corps – a largely autobiographical story about the adulterous relationship between a woman whose husband is on the front lines and a younger man – exerting his influence to collect the New World literary prize for the novel.

In 1921, he collaborates with the Group of Six for the libretto of Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel, a collective work that launches the new musical generation in France in the wake of Erik Satie who is their mentor. Also in 1921, Cocteau organizes a meeting between Radiguet and one of his friends, Philippe Berthelot, Secretary General of the Quai d”Orsay.

Cocteau”s reaction to Radiguet”s sudden death in 1923 creates a rift with some relatives who claim that he left him in despair, discouraged and in the grip of opium. Cocteau did not even attend the funeral. But Cocteau does not usually attend funerals. The author then immediately leaves Paris with Diaghilev for a performance of Les Noces by the Ballets Russes in Monte Carlo. Cocteau himself would later describe his attitude as “a reaction of astonishment and disgust”.

Cocteau explains his addiction to opium at that time as a simple coincidence linked to his chance affair with Louis Laloy, the director of the Monte-Carlo Opera. Cocteau”s addiction to opium and his efforts to wean himself off it have a decisive influence on his literary model. On August 31, 1927, during his indictment for “violation of the laws on poisonous substances”, the police discovered at his home at 6, rue de Surène, a complete opium smoker”s kit. Due to the interventions of influential politicians, this case did not have any judicial consequences.

His most famous book, Les Enfants Terribles (1929), was written in one week, during a difficult withdrawal.

Cocteau and the Bourgoints

It was at the Welcome Hotel in Villefranche-sur-Mer, where he lived, that Jean Cocteau met the Bourgoint family; they met through a mutual friend, Christian Bérard, a painter who created the sets for Cocteau”s plays. The Bourgoints had three children, the twins Maxime and Jeanne, and the youngest Jean.

Jeanne and Jean Bourgoint saw Cocteau again in 1925. Jean Cocteau met Charles Henrion in Meudon on June 15, 1925 at the Maritains” home. This disciple of Charles de Foucauld, dressed in a white burnous decorated with the red Sacred Heart, makes a great impression on Cocteau, who converts – temporarily – to Catholicism. On October 19th, Jean Cocteau takes communion, surrounded by Jean Bourgoint and Maurice Sachs. They socialize together until 1929, when Jeanne commits suicide, leaving her brother destitute. The life of Jeanne and Jean Bourgoint impresses Cocteau so much that he almost immediately begins to write their story, which will become Les Enfants terribles (1929).

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Maturity

In the 1930s, Cocteau had an affair with Princess Nathalie Paley, the morganatic daughter of a grand duke of Russia, herself a milliner, actress or model and former wife of the couturier Lucien Lelong. Pregnant with Cocteau, the pregnancy could not be carried to term, which plunged the poet and the young woman into deep distress. Cocteau evokes Nathalie”s miscarriage in Le passé défini, and says that this abortion would be the consequence of a violent scene with Marie-Laure de Noailles: “She is responsible for Nathalie”s abortion. However, Cocteau having introduced the princess to opium, it is possible that there were repercussions due to this drug on the pregnancy.

In the 1930s, while living at 9, rue Vignon, Jean Cocteau experimented with the painter Jean Crotti, who was Suzanne Duchamp”s husband, with gemmail and it is probably from this period that his relationship with Marcel Duchamp dates, despite the opposition of André Breton.

Around 1933, Cocteau met Marcel Khill who became his companion and played, at his creation, the role of the messenger of Corinth in La Machine infernale. In 1936, they travelled together around the world in 80 days, as recounted by Jean Cocteau in Tour du monde en 80 jours. Mon premier voyage (1936).

Cocteau then had a long-term relationship with two French actors, Jean Marais and Édouard Dermit, the latter officially adopted by Cocteau. He is said to have had a relationship with Panama Al Brown, a boxer whose career he took charge of between 1935 and 1939.

In 1940, Le Bel Indifférent, a play by Cocteau written for Edith Piaf, was a huge success. He also worked with Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel on several projects, befriended much of the European art community, and struggled with his opium addiction for most of his adult life. While he is openly gay, he has a few brief and complicated affairs with women. His work is peppered with numerous criticisms of homophobia.

Jean Cocteau plays an ambiguous role during the Second World War, the resistance fighters accuse him of collaboration with the Germans, a part of his past (1939-1944) remains mysterious. Jean Cocteau wrote from the beginning of the Occupation in the collaborationist weekly La Gerbe created by the Breton writer Alphonse de Châteaubriant.

Cocteau is usually rather reserved when it comes to affirming his political commitment. During the Occupation, he showed a certain pacifism – “The honor of France,” he wrote in his Diary of May 5, 1942, “will perhaps be, one day, to have refused to fight” – but above all, he did not hesitate to welcome Arno Breker, the official sculptor of the Third Reich, when the latter exhibited in Paris in the summer of 1942. Leni Riefenstahl enjoyed his protection after the war for seven years.

“Nazi Germany was not without its charms either, especially its leader, of whom he formed a picture that should be placed in the museum of imaginary Hitlers. He is fascinated by the idea of the leader-artist, all-powerful politician at the same time as patron and protector of the arts, at once Napoleon and poet (“In Hitler, it was the poet who escaped these souls of pawns,” he writes, speaking of the pre-war French leaders).”

– Philippe Burrin, La France à l”heure allemande, Seuil, 1995, p. 352.

In 1941, the decision of the Prefect of Police to ban his Typewriter was overturned by the Propaganda Abteilung, anxious not to muzzle the French muse. Nevertheless, at the Liberation, he was quickly acquitted by the National Cinema Committee and the National Writers” Committee, before which he did not appear, purge committees before which he appeared for collaboration.

During a report on the writers of the Palais-Royal, Jean Cocteau meets the photographer Pierre Jahan. In 1946, Éditions du Compas publishes La mort et les statues (Death and Statues), a book for which Cocteau writes the poems that appear alongside photographs taken clandestinely in December 1941 by Pierre Jahan of bronze statues requisitioned by the Vichy regime and then sent to be melted down for the mobilization of non-ferrous metals to support the German war effort.

A few huge successes made Cocteau a household name: the novel Les Enfants terribles, the 1938 play Les Parents terribles, the film La Belle et la Bête. Having become a cinematographic reference, he presided over the jury of the Cannes Film Festival in 1953, then in 1954. In the spring of 1950, Jean Cocteau is invited by Francine Weisweiller, the wife of Alec Weisweiller, the wealthy heir of the Shell Company, to spend a week”s vacation in their villa Santo Sospir, at the tip of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, where he goes with his lover of the moment, the poet Gabriel Arnaud. The artist soon began by drawing an Apollo on the white walls above the fireplace in the living room; encouraged by Henri Matisse, he undertook to decorate the rest of the house where he enjoyed himself so much that he returned for eleven years; and from one to the next, he decorated the entire villa with frescoes in tempera, mosaics and a tapestry on themes from Greek mythology or the Bible, using color for the first time. He brought in many celebrities, including Pablo Picasso, Charlie Chaplin and Jean Marais, who was introduced to oil painting. It was out of friendship for Jean Cocteau that Francine Weisweiller named her yacht Orphée II.

On March 3, 1955, he was elected to the French Academy, by 17 votes against 11 to the historian Jérôme Carcopino and took the seat vacated by Jérôme Tharaud.

In 1960, the artist shot Le Testament d”Orphée with the financial support of François Truffaut.

At the same time, he became involved in the defense of the right to conscientious objection, among other things by sponsoring the committee created by Louis Lecoin, alongside André Breton, Albert Camus, Jean Giono and Abbé Pierre. This committee obtained a restricted status for objectors in December 1963.

He plays an important role in the genesis of the painter Raymond Moretti in the 1960s, which leads him to rub shoulders with Pablo Picasso.

Cocteau is not there to be happy: on October 10, 1963, learning the death of his friend Edith Piaf, he is taken by a choking attack and dies a few hours later of a heart attack in his home in Milly-la-Forêt, October 11, 1963. However, Jean Marais said in a television interview on October 12, 1963: “He died of a lung edema, his heart failed. He loved Edith very much, but I don”t think it was Edith”s death that caused Jean”s death.

At his funeral, the press and personalities are many to pay tribute to the poet: Marlene Dietrich, Zizi Jeanmaire, Roland Petit, Daniel Gélin, Rene Clair, Gilbert Bécaud, Georges Auric, Jean Wiener, Piéral …

Jean Cocteau lived for a long time in Paris at the Palais-Royal at 36, rue de Montpensier, where a commemorative plaque pays tribute to him. His house in Milly-la-Forêt, the Maison Cocteau, has become a museum, inaugurated on June 22, 2010.

He is buried in the chapel of Saint-Blaise-des-Simples in Milly-la-Forêt (Essonne). On his tombstone, this epitaph: “I remain with you.

In 1989, the city of Villefranche-sur-Mer paid tribute to him, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, by inaugurating a bronze bust made by Cyril de La Patellière and placed in front of the chapel of Saint Pierre that he had decorated in 1957.

In 2013, for the fiftieth anniversary of his death, the City of Metz paid tribute to him for his last masterpiece created in the church of Saint-Maximin de Metz (the stained glass windows), a Jean Cocteau square was inaugurated on this occasion near this religious place.

The Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris has a Jean Cocteau collection composed of manuscripts, correspondence and photographs acquired in three stages: the purchase of part of the manuscripts between 1990 and 2002, the purchase of Cocteau”s library from 1995 and the Pierre Bergé donation in 2006. Pierre Bergé was the moral owner of the writer”s works and president of the Fondation Cocteau. The university library of Montpellier holds a study and research fund on Jean Cocteau and his time, born in 1989 from a donation by Édouard Dermit to the University Paul-Valéry-Montpellier.

Ceramics (1957-1963)

In the workshop of Madeleine Jolly and Philippe Madeline in Villefranche-sur-Mer, he creates more than 300 ceramics and jewelry. During the same period he draws poems-objects.

He worked on engobe and invented the oxide pencil to give his decorations a pastel aspect.

The catalog raisonné of Annie Guédras presents color and black and white photographs of ceramics created by Jean Cocteau.

During the same period, he designed jewelry, ornaments and sculptures.

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Tapestries

Jean Cocteau says: “There is nothing more noble than a tapestry. It is our language translated into another, richer language, with accuracy and with love. It is a melodious work of harpist. One should see them, our harpists, playing on the threads at full speed, turning their backs on the model, going to consult it, coming back to play their music of silence. One is surprised that such a luxury exists in our time when comfort replaces it. One day with Picasso, at the Opera, we noticed that mediocre works took on grace and style when translated into this language. But when the original text and the translation are in balance, then one marvels at our craftsmanship in France.

“Jean Cocteau”s woolen poems” were named after his tapestries and this title testifies to his admiration for the art of weaving. Raymond Picaud will weave the first tapestries starting from the cartoons drawn by Cocteau at the Aubusson factory in the workshop he directs. Nowadays the tapestries are visible in some museums and in galleries such as the Boccara gallery specialized in carpets and artistic tapestries.

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Places decorated by Cocteau on the French Riviera

Saint-Maximin church in Metz : the stained glass windows

The stained glass work created by Jean Cocteau for the church of Saint-Maximin in Metz is his last great masterpiece, which was essentially completed posthumously. Edouard Dermit, his adopted son, will see to the full execution of the project designed by Jean Cocteau. He will be helped in this task by Jean Dedieu who was the cartonnier and will make the different models from Cocteau”s drawings and propose them to the master glassmakers.

Three major ideas characterize the originality of his work on stained glass: a work-witness of the art of the twentieth century, an innovative and prophetic work and finally a work celebrating immortality and the beyond. It is also the first time that he develops the figure of the androgynous in the central stained glass window of the apse (the window of the man with raised arms).

His relationship with alchemy also seems to be established as well as his taste for biomorphism and totemism in the representation of the African universe in the south transept (the bay of the south transept).

On the theme of immortality developed in the 24 bays of this small parish church, he never ceased to use mythology and in particular the character of Orpheus to bring back to life the loved ones and even make them immortal.

He remains faithful to the 1950 film Orpheus where he proclaims: “Man is saved, Death dies, it is the myth of immortality.”

At the end of 1959, three years before his death, Jean Cocteau, at the invitation of the French ambassador, painted a fresco in the Church of Our Lady of France in London, in the Soho district, near Leicester Square, between the 3rd and 11th November 1959. It consists of three panels: the Annunciation, the Crucifixion and the Assumption.

In 1951, Cocteau designed the chandeliers that decorate the room of Studio 28 located at 10, Rue Tholozé – 18th district.

In 1955, Cocteau was a member of the Académie française and the Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique.

Cocteau was Commander of the Legion of Honor, member of the Mallarmé Academy, the German Academy, the American Academy, the Mark Twain Academy, Honorary President of the Cannes Film Festival, Honorary President of the France-Hungary Association, President of the Jazz Academy and the Recording Academy.

The Carnavalet Museum in Paris holds a full-length portrait of Jean Cocteau by Jacques-Emile Blanche, dated 1913. This painting was given to the museum by Georges Mevil-Blanche in 1949.

In 1963, Arno Breker sculpted the bronze bust of Cocteau that adorns his tomb in Milly-la-Forêt. At the same time, he also modeled a statue and molded the hands of the poet.

In 1989, on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, the Welcome Hotel in Villefranche-sur-Mer, where Cocteau was born, and the restorers commissioned the sculptor Cyril de La Patellière to create a bronze bust of Jean Cocteau. Placed in front of the hotel, next to the Saint-Pierre chapel on the port, on the top of an old stone cut as a base and coming from the Villefranche citadel, this bust was inaugurated on July 5, 1989 in the presence of the sculptor, Édouard Dermit, Jean Marais, Charles Minetti (sponsor of the project), and the director of the Welcome hotel. On the pedestal is written this sentence of the poet: “When I see Villefranche, I see my youth again, make the men that it never changes”. A separate copy of this bust by the same sculptor is in the Cocteau Museum in Menton (the Bastion), commissioned by Hugues de La Touche, former curator of museums in Menton

Comic book : Cocteau, l”enfant terrible – François Rivière (scenario) and Laureline Mattiussi (drawing) Éditions Casterman, 2020 (ISBN 9782203131767)

It is chaired by Dominique Marny, granddaughter of Paul Cocteau (1881-1961), Jean”s older brother.

External links

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