Cocteau, Jean

Cocteau, Jean (1889–1963). French writer, film director, designer, painter, and draughtsman. One of the most dazzling figures of his time in the intellectual avant-garde, he was the friend of leading painters such as Modigliani and Picasso, and in his work for the theatre he collaborated with, for example, Diaghilev and the composers Erik Satie and Igor Stravinsky. His work included poetry, novels, plays, films, and a large number of paintings, drawings, theatrical designs, and pottery articles. He was self-taught as an artist. In his painting and drawing he was much influenced by Picasso, and his favourite themes included the figures of Harlequin, embodying the theatre, and Orpheus, the personification of the poet. His most lasting achievement was in the cinema, his reputation resting mainly on his beautiful adaptation of the famous story of Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête, 1946, with design by Christian Bérard), and on three films dealing with the role of the artist and the nature of his inspiration— Cocteau's recurrent preoccupation—Le Sang d'un poète (1930), Orphée (1950), and Testament d'Orphée (1960).

There is a Cocteau museum at Menton on the Côte d'Azur; in discussing it Michael Jacobs and Paul Stirton comment that ‘It is unlikely that Cocteau would have achieved any reputation at all as an artist had he not been so talented in other fields; his strongly linear works seem merely to reflect all that was sentimental and slapdash in the art of his friend Picasso’ (The Mitchell Beazley Traveller's Guides to Art: France, 1984). At Menton Cocteau also decorated the room reserved for civil marriages in the town hall; Jacobs and Stirton consider that ‘The place would make an excellent setting for a high-class confectioners'. Other examples of Cocteau's decorative work include paintings (1960) of the Crucifixion, Annunciation, and Assumption in the church of Notre Dame de France, Leicester Place, London—‘The draughtsmanship precise and elegant, as one would expect, the style, as one would also expect, similar to Picasso's in his most classicist mood, the mood however of a somewhat mannered sentimentality’ ( Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry, The Buildings of England: London, vol. i, 1973).