Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau was a multifaceted intellectual who, from the 1920s to the 1950s, worked as a writer, draftsman, painter, printmaker, stage designer, and filmmaker. Cocteau’s artistic practice was closely tied to his roles as an instigator and patron of the visual and literary French avant-gardes, as well as a socialite.

Born into a cultured, bourgeois Parisian family, Cocteau belonged to an influential social network that also introduced him to important developments in modern art. In particular, during the years 1910–12, Cocteau met the writer André Gide, the aristocratic patron of modern painting and music Count Etienne de Beaumont, and the socialite and patron Misia Sert. Through Sert, he was introduced to the experimental world of the Ballets Russes, run by Sergei Diaghilev, which included the renowned dancer Vaslav Nijinsky as well as the composer Igor Stravinsky. In 1912 Cocteau became involved in the conception and staging of many groundbreaking Ballets Russes productions. His most celebrated early work, Parade, was conceived during a trip in Italy with Pablo Picasso, and was staged by Diaghilev at the Paris-based Théâtre du Châtelet in May 1917. The ballet was a modernist fusion of the arts, bringing together a scenario by Cocteau, the music of Erik Satie, sets and costumes by Picasso, and choreography by Léonide Massine. Among Cocteau’s subsequent theatrical collaborations were Le Boeuf sur le toit, a short musical farce with music by Darius Milhaud and sets by Raoul Dufy that premiered in 1920, and Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, with a collective score by the group of young composers known as Les Six (Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre) and designs by Jean Hugo, staged by the Ballets Suédois in 1921.

By the 1920s Cocteau’s writings and drawings, which he had started making around 1917, played a key role in modernism’s return to classical themes. Like many other artists and poets during this time period, he demonstrated a renewed interest in Catholicism spearheaded by the philosopher Jacques Maritain. In 1925 Cocteau’s first major drama, Orphée, a synthesis of antiquity and modernism, fantasy and reality, reached the stage in Paris. The following year Cocteau published Le Rappel à l’ordre: discipline et liberté, the title of which has come to stand for the general trend toward classicism in the arts of the 1920s.

From 1925, Cocteau stayed for extended periods in Villefranche-sur-Mer. There, he established connections with many artists and patrons living in the south of France and began to incorporate Mediterranean imagery into his work. With the financial backing of art patron Charles de Noailles, in 1930 Cocteau directed his first film, Le sang d’un poète, which marked the beginning of a long-lasting engagement with this medium. Though Cocteau was recognized as a prominent artist later in his life, he never stopped collaborating with more emerging talents, including the actor Jean Marais, who gained fame after starring in Cocteau’s 1946 movie adaptation of La Belle et la bête, and the painter Raymond Moretti. In 1953, Cocteau served as president of the jury of the Cannes Film Festival and continued to work in film until late in his life; his final movie, Le Testament d'Orphée, was produced by François Truffaut in 1960.