Jean Cocteau: The Juggler's Revenge

Jean Cocteau worked in a wide, some might call it wild, range of media and artistic strategies. He was a draftsperson, a designer, a muralist, a writer, a critic, a poet, a playwright, a filmmaker. The visual part of his multi-faceted oeuvre moved from the decorative to the more purely fine arts, from Symbolism to the surreal, from Dada to Deco, and beyond. Cocteau’s personalities and practices range from ambiguous to contradictory, confessional to enigmatic. His working modes ranged from designing beading patterns for Schiaparelli couture to creating (and elevating) such banal objects as matchbooks.

Cocteau’s queer lifestyle and aesthetic were both celebrated and scorned. From the 1920s to the 1960s, his multi-disciplinary projects were at odds with a time when the art world favored media specificity and canonical trajectories. Thus, Cocteau’s heterogeneous means of making art often confused or agitated art historians, critics, and the public at large. For example, Kenneth E. Silver, the exhibition’s curator, characterized Cocteau as juggler, dilettante, chameleon. Another contributor to the show’s accompanying catalogue, Blake Oetting, reminds us that Cocteau described himself “as a lie which always tells the truth.”

Reflection, doubling, and most forcefully mirroring are recurrent themes and strategies that play out within Cocteau’s visual and textual oeuvre. The focus of this smartly curated exhibition is mainly on the artist’s visual production, which, in many mediums, remains the scopic. Speaking to such fascination—and the mythical/allegorical nature of Cocteau’s production, the monograph’s laser-focused, non-traditional opening salvo begins not with a work by the elusive French “juggler” to whom it is dedicated, but rather begins with a similarly allegorical work by Felix Gonzales-Torres (1957-1996). Featuring Gonzales-Torres’s 1991 work conceptually pairing two vertical mirrors Untitled (Orpheus, Twice) in relation to a theme that also obsessed Cocteau was a brilliant curatorial stroke. In this staging, Gonzalez-Torres’s seemingly simple, yet highly conceptual piece offers a prelude—better yet coda—to Cocteau’s use of the same theme. Think of Gonzalez-Torres’s work as a stage set. It imbricates the space as unstable, the viewer as reflected, and the works of art in the gallery as virtually, if ephemerally, refracted. All this is analogous to the slippery nature of Cocteau’s art, the multiple meanings of the classic tale of Orpheus and as a reminder of the personal devastation of the AIDS epidemic, not just for the late-twentieth-century artist, but also for society itself. Within this conceptual backdrop—Gonzales-Torres being virtually two generations younger than Cocteau, Silver exhibits only two of Cocteau’s contrasting works: a cut from Cocteau’s 1950 film Orpheusand a complex object from 1960/1989 titled Orpheus’s Mirror. The latter, a jewel-like, mechanical construction of gilded bronze, silver, and copper—part medieval monstrance, part Renaissance astrolabe—is likewise mirrored within Gonzales-Torres’s refractive installation. It also reverberates within the context of Cocteau’s mythological theme, as well as his materially diverse, often illusive practices.

The complexity of exhibiting such a multifarious artist as Cocteau is notable. Evidently, the idea of a purely chronological presentation for Cocteau would have been wrong headed, and ultimately would have compromised both the artist’s interests and his polyphonous thought. Thus, Silver broke the installation into subject-specific spaces, even when the individual galleries were not always neatly parallel in subject matter. Subtitled “Word and Image,” the second gallery offers a wide array of Cocteau’s printed books, including evidently his well-known Les Enfants terribles as well as the 1941 play La machine a ecrire (The Typewriter), along with drawings which combine image and writing, which Cocteau saw as equals. Sometimes in Cocteau’s drawings the representation of the human face and body become challenged if not overwhelmed by text. The extreme example here is the Self-portrait for Jean l’Oiseueler, where the drawing of the head and shoulders of the sitter is purposefully faint and the words—sometimes micrographic in form—take precedence in the forcefulness of their execution. Essentially one has to find one’s textual bearings before the delicate portrait can be either perceived or appreciated. Writing and image are again inextricably linked in the exhibition’s third gallery, “Cocteau’s Classicism.” The euphemistic “juggler’s” interests in classical subjects already established, here we find a photo of Cocteau in the Role of Heurtebise (Orpheus) in 1927. Likewise, Cocteau casts the multi-talented actress (also model and photographer), Lee Miller in a role devised for his film Sang d’un Poet, (Blood of the Poet) 1930. In the film, Miller is transformed from a statue into a living, breathing being, we once again see the artist playing with and performing, not only the permeable membrane he deploys between text and image, but more so we understand his obsession with blurring the boundaries between representation and reality. Of course, Cocteau was not fooled by the fact that the film, in which the inert material seems to transform into human flesh, remains merely another representation of a fabricated reality: essentially this technological advancement propels a mis en abyme.

Designated “Cocteau Incarnate,“ the next gallery presents the erotic nature which was, according to Silver, as important to the artist as the aesthetic and intellectual aspects of his various practices and media. Included are Cocteau’s 1947 illustrations for Jean Genet’s Querelle de Brest—with their seductive depiction of sailors—as well as his own volume Le Livre Blanc, originally published anonymously because of its homosexual content. Here and in the next two galleries, such personal reflections continue as they detail Cocteau’s friends and lovers, in addition to works done under the influence of his opium addiction. Many of those depicted were the contemporary glitterati of Paris’s artistic, film, and theatrical society. Lovers and other human objects of attraction and seduction are naturally represented in these galleries. For the homoerotic depictions in these sections Cocteau often deploys a fleshy “fey” line, which would be picked up and transformed by, to mention just two examples, Andy Warhol and David Hockney in the 1950s and 1960s. While Warhol’s and Hockney’s spin offs of Cocteau’s erotic drawing style remain purely sensuous, a kind of delectable attraction for the delicate, the beautiful, and often effete male objects, Cocteau’s line, and his more forthcoming depictions, are carnal, to put it simply. Cocteau’s foray into film already discussed with his experimental cult film The Blood of a Poet, the curator paid particular attention in various galleries to Cocteau’s important work in film. His Beauty and the Beast, 1946, was a fully professional production featuring noted movie stars and using celebrated professional designers for sets and costumes.

Another gallery is devoted to Cocteau’s long-lived and influential relationship with Peggy Guggenheim, who in fact showed Cocteau at the 1938 debut of her London gallery, playfully called Guggenheim Jeune. None other than Marcel Duchamp provided the introduction between these two talented and ambitious characters. Naturally there were numerous anecdotes related to Guggenheim’s presentation of Cocteau’s work. The spiciest was the attempt by British customs to bar the import and showing of a large drawing/collage for which Cocteau used a bedsheet as the support. Cocteau’s lover, Jean Marais and two friends, appeared here with the “juggler” using actual pubic hair in his depiction of their groins. A compromise was made with customs in which Guggenheim would have to sequester this work in the privacy of her office.

What are we to do with Cocteau’s known Nazi sympathies discussed in the catalogue? As a gay man he became marginalized as a Nazi collaborator, his work called “degenerate,” and he and his lover, Jean Marais, dubbed “corrupters of youth.” Cocteau’s “Salut to Breker”(the Nazi sculptor and Hitler devotee who was having an exhibition at the Orangerie in Paris) appeared in May 1942 on the front page of the magazine Comoedia. Silver notes that the “juggler” may have tried this tactic as a cover-up for all the negative press and threats he was receiving. He was tried immediately after World War II for collaboration, and though cleared, this act and accusation remained a thorn in his reputation for the remainder of his life. Silver gives a serious and attentive understanding to this problem—which the curator reminds us, in a quote from one of Cocteau’s biographers, was considered “his poverty of judgement.” Cocteau would try to brush this act aside with excuses about his allure to the hyper-masculinity and sharp presentation of the standardized Nazi male. Of course, a number of other major artistic voices, including the German painter Emil Nolde and the gay American architect Phillip Johnson, also fell under such grotesque racist and political seduction. How we reconcile such brutal connections to racial and ethnic hatred has become increasingly current in the last several years.

In light of Silver’s inspired use of contemporary artistic intervention previously described as part of this show’s first gallery, one could ask if it might have been possible to engage a similar political/ethical artist’s intervention somewhere within the space of the show? I am thinking of work such as that by Hans Haacke on Nazi thefts of art, recently shown at the New Museum in New York, as well as Mischa Kuball’s large investigation into Emil Nolde’s complicity with Nazism. The latter was a joint exhibition and publication project created with the Documenta archive in Dusseldorf and the Nolde Stiftung in Seebull, both in Germany. Is such an intervention possible? How would it have affected the exhibition? Who might be the living artist/s to consider for such a project that might forcefully situate viewers within such historical and moral considerations?

This show has many thematic and artistic connections to the premises of biennale curator Adriano Pedrosa’s conceptual construction of this important global exhibition. Silver’s Cocteau flawlessly connects to the theme “Foreigners Everywhere,” with one of its focus on gay men as strangers even within their own societies. The work of the American painter Louis Fratino and the Lebanese mosaicist Omar Mismar are but two examples of such gender specific works included. However, the diversity of practices of many artists included in Pedroso’s exhibition is yet another connection with the range of Cocteau’s work, and like Cocteau such range has become common with a considerable number of contemporary artists. Artists such as Harmony Hammond are described as approaching abstraction through many media and commonplace references, Singapore-born Charmaine Poh, characterized as an “artist, documentarian, and writer” are examples. Outside Pedroso’s exhibiton spaces, the representative of National Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates Abdullah Al Saadi is described as a wanderer, chronicler, cartographer, poet, decipherer, alchemist, memory carrier, and storyteller. Such multiple approaches and multifaceted descriptions make Cocteau’s means and practices seem to pale by comparison. Nevertheless such analogies make Cocteau, with all his complexities, tribulations, talents and vices a person for our moment. His show at the Peggy Guggenheim is a perfect link to the themes and practices of the artists included in the 60th Venice Biennale.