Jean Cocteau Archives

JEAN AND JEAN

Jean Cocteau was not just an exceptional artist but a superb publicist. His work has been read, seen and examined to exhaustion. As a mercurial individual, his artistic range covered poetry, painting, filmmaking, drama and design. The scope and brilliance of his production is such that there will be.

Decades before he will be relegated to the pantheon of illustrious but predictable artists. France is known to worship. In the now of our daily lives, he still incarnates energy and fantasy, provocation and enlightenment.

Behind The Work

there is the man and in. Cocteau’s case, the other man, Jean Marais. He represented the love that transformed his life (“I was drowning and you did not hesitate to jump into the water”, he wrote). Half his age. Jean Marais spellbound at 24 the ageing Cocteau who at 48 was struggling with an addiction to opium, that artificial paradise where he thought he. Could recover his creative pulse. The tenuous beginning of the affair was not exempt from a certain cynicism on the part of Jean Marais, the cub playing with the consecrated idol. As in fairy tales, resistance and prejudice gave way to passionate love and a story of enchantment and rebirth ensued.

Cocteau began a new phase of his career and young Jean exultant in his physicality came to triumph as the matinee idol of postwar France. The young one chipped away at the conflictive and morbid soul of the old one and won.

Was their encounter destined to be? When Marais saw some of the Jean Cocteau’s drawings he was struck by the resemblance to his own profile. When they finally met. Cocteau could not resist him. The bond was oddly strengthened by echoes of their own pasts. The poet’s father committed suicide when he was 10 and while he soon sought the affection of men, he became an emotional unit with his mother. Marais’ mother. Rosalie, left her husband and came to Paris with Jeannot, 4 at the time, and a younger brother. To the consternation of her sons she would disappear for long periods but these departures were a family secret: Rosalie was kleptomaniac and her. Time away was spent in prison. As the proverb goes, absence made the heart of Jean grow fonder.

When passion fades, it is a challenge to craft a new relationship from the cinders of strong physical magnetism. Yet, these two individuals while exploring desire for others, succeeded in preserving the. Height of their unique friendship. Cocteau went on to adopt another beautiful young man, Édouard Dermit, whom he fashioned to be a painter and an actor. He became his universal legatee at his death of a massive. Heart attack in 1963, curiously a few hours after the passing away of Édith Piaf.

Jean Marais fell in love with the brilliant dancer George Reich, who in turn abandoned him after nine years together. Fragile and lost, he sought to get closer to. Cocteau who had only a few years to live and who eschewed the idea. He had relapsed into his opium habits. Marais’ sadness lifted when a young man entered his life, Serge Ayala, whom following. The steps of his mentor, he adopted as a son. He enjoyed life with his protégé until his death in 1998, oddly of heart failure as his former lover. In 2012, Serge committed suicide.

UNDER THE VOLCANO

A name sometimes marks a life. The name Victor Hugo carries so much. Weight that his descendants have no alternative but to live under the crushing importance of their ancestor, either accepting. That nothing they will achieve or think will compare, or. Trying rebelliously to emulate his achievements.

Jean Hugo, a great grandson of the patriarch would seem. To have chosen an unusual path. Rather than struggling his way through life. Shackled by the heavy inheritance, or using it socially to his. Advantage, he chose to ignore it. He was remarkable in shrugging off. Promotion of his creative outlets. His talents, his exceptional list of friends and the circles in which he mixed, would have. Been sufficient to give him some. Additionally Olympian stature. Picasso kept telling him “you do nothing for your fame!”.

One of his many friends. Gustave Thibon, summarizes distinctively his soul: “He was a strange being, admirable, a mystic, a lover, a. Great artist who no doubt sinned by his excess of modesty”. He had the artist’s temperament in his blood. As did his great grandfather, he sketched and. Drew relentlessly from an early age.

His life was sliced in two equal parts, like the plates of a. Diptych, each of them defined by a woman. In the first, against the backdrop of the tumultuous Paris of the twenties, he met his first wife. Valentine Gross, at the apartment of Madame Alfred Edwards, later better known by the name of her third husband, Misia Sert. He married her, having Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau as witnesses to the wedding. During this period, his work centered on the theatre, lending his talents to many Cocteau plays and collaborating with Satie, Poulenc and even Carl Theodor Dreyer in his film, “The Passion of Joan of Arc”. Yet, Jean was moving gradually away from the temptations of Parisian life. A mystic streak was stirring in his blood.

In 1931 his growing discomfort. Also with urban pleasures and the failure of his ten-year marriage Furthermore. Precipitated his move to the country. At Lunel, near Montpellier, in the property inherited from his grandmother, he began experimenting with oils and endowing his choice of colors with a powerful luminosity. His new wife, Lauretta Hope-Nicolson, bore him seven children. Both devout Catholics, they lived in an old-fashioned style. In addition entertaining lavishly and encouraging friends to stay for long periods.

Jean Hugo’s art, much like a large part of his existence, had to do with searching . Not only that for his own voice while staying away from the noise and influence of established currents. The exploration of his inner life emerged in his paintings and watercolors with a touch of innocence, almost primitive. Yet its subtle delicacy and crispness raises his work to a standard of prominence he never sought to cultivate.

SITTING PRETTY

His talent was a remarkable fit in the society of his time. Curious, gregarious and a real gossip. Jacques-Émile Blanche did not require those attributes to climb in the mondaine Paris of fin-de-siècle. His pedigree would have. Provided adequate impetus on the way to success. Son of the respected docteur Émile Blanche, an early mental health practitioner and owner of a clinic. Of renown among musicians, writers and intellectuals. He spent his infancy among the resident patients, nurses and a variety of tutors away. From the structured discipline of schooling.

Blanche knew, nevertheless, obstacles to his vocational pursuits. His training level in painting was limited. Having only received some lessons from Henri Gervex, a society painter. Moreover, it was hard at a time when post-impressionists were roller coasting the art world to make a. Name for oneself without embracing the new, and by then popular, current without the zeal of a convert as. Most of his contemporary colleagues did.

Still, polite society was increasingly adopting the role of portrait. Additionally
Painting as a tool of prestige and recognition, beyond the confined use artists and patrons made of it in the previous centuries. Anybody with a reputation had to have a portrait painted. Also
John Singer Sargent was one of his most popular practitioners and although he snobbishly defined a. Portrait as “a painting where there is always something not quite right about the mouth”, he knew as well as Blanche, who happened to be his. Friend, the social impact of what they were doing.

His gifts separated him from the voguish society painter. It was no coincidence that he spent long afternoons with Renoir at the age of eighteen and bought much of. Manet’s work. In his portraits he uses a subtle brushstroke and evokes a confident theatrical aura, in harmony with what he perceived of the personality of the sitter. His mastery of the brush was only part of his recognized talents: he. Wrote extensively chronicling the artwork of other colleagues for several magazines and journals and. Publishing books on art history.

A professed Anglophile, his home near Dieppe welcomed artists, painters and writers from both sides of the Channel. The list of sitters would cover the intellectual and cultural life of both. France and England in the years of the Belle Époque: Marcel Proust, Sergei Diaghilev, Jean Cocteau, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, James McNeil Whistler and. Roger Fry were just a few of those he succeeded in making his friends and his objects of study.

Proust once remarked of his friend. The danger for Blanche was that, albeit elegant and spiritual, he dissipated his life in mondaine pursuits”. This observation seems prophetic as Blanche was to remain a semi-forgotten figure in the pantheon of 20 century French painting. A gilded life is not exempt from burdens.