Perhaps one of the most versatile artists of his generation, Jean Cocteau was an accomplished writer, visual artist, and film maker. Cocteau, however, always considered himself primarily a poet.
In 1889 Cocteau was born to a politically prominent family in Maison-Lafitte, a small town near Paris. Cocteau’s father, a painter, committed suicide when the boy was only nine years old. By the age of fifteen he had left home to live the life of a Bohemian. Cocteau’s initial creative output was a volume of poems entitled Aladdin’s Lamp. He befriended Marcel Proust and in 1912 Léon Bakst persuaded him to write the libretto to Le Dieu bleu for the Ballets Russes which featured a young Vaslav Nijinsky. Later ballet projects saw Cocteau collaborate with Sergei Diaghilev, Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, and Amedeo Modigliani.
Cocteau was not generally known as a painter. His visual output was primarily sketching and set designs. His existing drawings reveal a style that was heavily influenced by his friend Pablo Picasso. Long continuous lines and quick movements are enough to convey his ideas that often reference classical imagery.
Jean Cocteau’s work is often personal, mapping his own perspective onto the universal through reimagining myth in contemporary life, resulting in novel perspectives on familiar situations. Cocteau avoided the overtly political, favoring the escape from life offered through explorations of dream and the unconscious.
Jean Cocteau’s work is regularly described as ‘surreal,’ though he was never affiliated with the Surrealist group. Cocteau, like the Surrealists, was interested in exploring dreams and the unconscious and his mythologization of everyday life is similar to that of key figures such as Louis Aragon and Luis Buñuel, with whom he was on friendly terms. André Breton, the leader of the Surrealist group, however, viewed Cocteau’s Romantic aesthetic as conservative and as anathema to the Surrealist creed of pure automatism and this, exacerbated by personal disagreements and Breton’s homophobia, meant that Cocteau and the Surrealist group denied all links, despite their artistic similarities.
