Nous croyens en l’Europe (We believe in Europe) are illustrations for a tract published by Cocteau in 1961. I see this image as Liberty riding a goat, a reference to Freemasonry and maybe to Cassius Coolidge’s images of Dogs Playing Poker (1894).
Jean Cocteau at Hôtel Napoléon, Menton-Garavan
Permanent display in one of the hotels in Menton-Garavan of works of writer, film director and artist Jean Cocteau (1889-1963); he is maybe best known in England for the title of his novel Les Enfants Terribles (1929). Cocteau developed his own visual style at the height of the Art Deco period, worked with Pablo Picasso, was supported by Henri Matisse, is believed to have worked with Jean Genet on the silent film Un chant d’amour (1950) as film editor (the film was banned by the censors on account of its homosexual content), wrote a hit one act drama/monologue for his unlikely friend Edith Piaf and enjoyed a scandalous life as a homosexual whilst this was illegal in France. He was Chair of the jury of the Cannes Film Festivals of 1953 and 1954. Jean Cocteau wrote and directed his last film Le Testament d’Orphée (1960) with financial support from François Truffaut.
Jean Cocteau’s images on display here are from the Fifties and Sixties when Europe was reconstructing following World War 2. His work on paper is to me more direct than his films. Cocteau’s charming later style, with his strong line and haunting imagery, conveys the idealism of those grim years: images of angels and the ambition to rebuild better. Jean Cocteau brings a whiff of the opium-fuelled atmosphere of French Art Deco from the Twenties and early Thirties to the post-war period.
Now, sixty years later and as the latest government in France looks even more fragile than the last, I see Cocteau’s work as dreamlike and hopeful, endearing but unfortunately not enduring, just as the media on which he works looks to be failing, acid paper, cigarette smoke damage etc. In the UK we would be celebrating him as a gay icon but it seems that France hasn’t got there quite yet.
The sunshine and the rosé wine are still here on the Riviera but the storms are gathering ever more insistently around the Mediterranean; as I write this in a hotel room surrounded by the artwork of Jean Cocteau and stills from his films, my view across the Plage des Sablettes to the municipal museum of his work is being lashed by the latest squall. His artwork seems a metaphor for our predicaments, climate and political.
