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Jean Cocteau RAHA/14/October/2003 A major winter exhibition has opened at the Pompidou Centre in central Paris, dedicated to Jean Cocteau - writer, poet, artist, director and yet more besides. Hugh Schofield reports. Who was Jean Cocteau? The name is instantly familiar, conjuring an image of mid-century aesthete, poised with tousled hair and cigarette in slender hand as he contemplates a line of poetry, a set-design or the curve of some other objet d'art. But what did Jean Cocteau actually do? Exactly 40 years after his death, the answer is less obvious. A man who counted among his friends the best-known painters and musicians of the time - who symbolised an artistic sensibility that came to be defined as "modern" - is today something of an abstraction. Few even in France would be able to list more than a handful of his works - the films "Beauty and the Beast" and "Orpheus" would probably top the list - and the vast majority of his immense output of poetry, plays, novels, drawings and literary criticism has been long forgotten. But somehow the magnetism remains. A major winter exhibition just opened at the Pompidou Centre in central Paris has been drawing in large crowds - many young and many foreign - all seeking a fuller understanding of an almost mythic figure of 20th century culture. Cocteau was born to a wealthy family in the Paris suburb of Maison Laffitte in 1889 - the same year that the Eiffel Tower was completed - and he died in 1963, a few hours after learning of the death of his friend the singer Edith Piaf. Over a furious 50 year period he was introduced to society by Marcel Proust, created ballets with Sergey Diaghilev, drew with Pablo Picasso, versified with Guillaume Appollinaire and Paul Eluard, published the music of Igor Stravinsky and Eric Satie, and sparred with Tristan Tzara and the Dada-ists. He experimented with cinema, smoked copious amounts of opium, managed a world champion boxer, made love with novelist Raymond Radiguet and his favourite screen actor Jean Marais, and was painted by Diego Rivera, Raoul Dufy, Amedeo Modigliani and - posthumously - by Andy Warhol. He was an artistic polymath who defined all his oeuvre as "poetry," and was famously captured in the 1949 trick image by photographer Philippe Halsman as a six-armed prodigy - one hand holding a book, the others a pen, a cigarette, a paintbrush and scissors, the sixth gesturing. The picture opens the exhibition "Jean Cocteau on the edge of the century," which is then organised around a series of not always comprehensible themes - such as "The Invisible Man," "Coinciding," "Escaping" - and contains some 900 photographs, manuscripts, artefacts and audiovisual installations. According to Cocteau's friend Pierre Bergé, the aim is to rescue the artist from the "misunderstanding" which he inspired even during his life - when he was often disparaged as a dilettante, dabbling in myriad different forms but mastering none. "Alone he climbed the path that led to a kind of glory, but one that was often contested ... Today we can measure his importance, and it is considerable. A protean artist, he reached every shore of creation," Bergé writes in the catalogue. Among the items are photographs from the Montparnasse artists' colony of the 1910s, crude anti-German caricatures from World War I, a series of self-portraits without a face, a model head made of pipe-cleaners, pornographic jottings, and the ceremonial sword he designed when he was elected a member of the prestigious French Academy. The damaging incident in World War II is documented, when as a resident of occupied Paris he published a gushing "Salute to Arno Breker" - Hitler's favourite sculptor. The letter is balanced by articles in the collaborationist press denouncing Cocteau as an "opium addict and Judaicised homosexual." The audiovisual section includes screenings of five of his feature-length films, footage of his induction into the Academy, and pre-war newsreel of Al Brown - the black boxer whom he persuaded to return to the ring. According to the organisers, the last century could not recognise the talent of one of its most prolific artists because he failed to fit any of the categories that were devised to make sense of all its head-spinning changes. Only with perspective can Cocteau be appreciated. The difficulty is that thanks to his scatter-gun creative instinct, his work is as diffuse as it is massive. What stands out is a force of huge artistic energy, but the focus is blurred. An abstraction Cocteau remains.
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October 2003 ©AFP Source: http://www.expatica.com/france.asp |
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