Jean Cocteau's reputation has always suffered from the scope of his wildly varied activities. Multi-talented, artistically inclined chameleons are not always taken seriously, and his admission to the Académie française was therefore a surprise to many. Yet whoever considers his free fall through the art world will see how seriously Cocteau operated. He has doubtlessly proved himself to be a poet first and foremost, but his entrance into the world of the avant-garde took place in a different field. This Parisian son of a man of independent means grew up in an artistic but conventional environment connected mainly to the music and theatre world. The young Cocteau therefore spent more time in the wings than in school, leading to his expulsion from the lycée-Condorcet in 1904.Cocteau's first work was conventional: articles, drawings, a magazine produced together with the interesting printer-poet Bernouard, three collections of poetry, and three trivial works, according to his own later judgment. Meanwhile he grew acquainted with a new world of Cubism, Picasso, Satie's music, Milhaud, Stravinsky, and Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, for which he designed a few sets. He finally saw the light in 1913 during the premiere of Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps. That very year, Le Potomak came into being: a happy combination of prose and drawings that was to become a turning point in his life. The ballet Parade (1917), on which he collaborated with Satie and Picasso, also became a memorable theatrical scandal, similar to Sacre. From then on, it would be hard to keep up with Cocteau's activities.
He was attuned to novelties, and loved to warm himself by the fire of artistic scandals. His adventures with stunt pilot and wartime flier Roland Garros gave extra status to the modernist collection Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance (1920), while his collaboration with Darius Milhaud yielded the pantomime play Le boeuf sur le toit (1920). Raymond Radiguet, whose untimely death in 1923 shocked Cocteau deeply, led him back to conventional paths via a detour of opium and religion. A collection of poetry like Plain-chant (1923) is an example of this. Cocteau became a fashionable figure, but he also maintained his position as poet, novelist (Les enfants terribles, 1929), playwright, theoretician, painter, and even a near-convert of Jacques Maritain, a philosopher whose work was quite popular in those days. Cocteau's rather fashionable preference for antique motifs in modern forms is clearly expressed in his mature work as a playwright and filmmaker (the Orpheus films). All this brilliant spirit of innovation - first find, then search, was his motto - obscured a growing preoccupation with death. On 11 October 1963 his good friend Edith Piaf passed away. Cocteau died on the same day. (kb.nl)
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