Cocteau, writes the mmfa’s director, Guy Cogeval, in the book accompanying the show on its transatlantic tour, “was akin to the rhapsodists of antiquity, poets whose genius for improvisation expressed itself in assembling – literally sewing together – scattered fragments from widely differing traditions. . . . In North American eyes Cocteau stands at the centre of the rediscovery of those artists who in the twentieth century smashed the boundaries separating the arts.”
For anyone fascinated by the tumultuous story of Modern art, this show is a welcome arrival. Cocteau’s career, as the Pompidou show’s subtitle suggests, runs like a thread (the French word is fil) through the brilliant quilt of Parisian avant-gardism in the visual arts, theatre, poetry, and music, from its stunning debut between 1900 and the outbreak of the First World War, down to the 1960s, when the Modern idea everywhere began its long, slow unravelling. Cocteau knew everybody. He was photographed by Man Ray and Irving Penn, and sketched by Dufy, Picasso, Diego Rivera, Francis Picabia. He wrote a libretto for Stravinsky, joined forces with Erik Satie and Picasso to produce “Parade” (1917), the most notorious multimedia experiment of the Paris avant-garde, and, briefly, managed the career of bantamweight boxing champ Panama Al Brown.
But, forty years after his death, is Cocteau an artist whose time for second coming has arrived?
Given the current state of mass culture – shallow, coarse, rushed, mechanical, reproductive – we should be ready for something along the lines of Cocteau’s decadence. One would think the intellectual whimsy of his cinema, the lazybones nonchalance of his drawings and snapshots, the camp intensity he brought to his role as Modernity’s queer Peter Pan – ever the fabulously scattered boy – would have considerable appeal these days.
But the dishonesty of popular culture at the turn of the twenty-first century has left us with little interest in the likes of Cocteau. Terrorism, ideological extremism, the spread of mysterious diseases, and the agonizing, seemingly intractable plight of millions of people outside the (until recently) calm North Atlantic world have made us serious about everything, including, or especially, our pleasures. The exquisite dandy, a homosexual type adopted, and perfected, by Cocteau in Belle-Époque Paris, turned into an object of suspicion after the events at Stonewall galvanized the gay-rights movement; it has since become rare. Nobody these days – except for the transsexual and the drag queen, those inextinguishable figures of the perverse sublime – seems to have the patience and discipline necessary for such supreme vanity. Roleplaying did not disappear in the 1960s, of course. But, at least among artists and writers and public philosophers, the role of the dandy went into steep decline, along with the cult of style that had enjoyed a creative vogue from the time of Baudelaire, through Cocteau, down to Andy Warhol.
Cocteau was born into a wealthy family near Paris in 1889, and educated in private schools before drifting into avant-garde circles in Paris shortly after the turn of the century. He learned the Greek myths at home and school, picked up his aesthetic in the opulent, over-stuffed mansion of his parents, and learned a lot simply by being a wide-eyed lad in the Paris of the grandes cocottes. He got to know the classic French theatre while hanging out in his teenaged years with the flamboyant actor Edouard de Max at the Comédie-Française. He learned about camp extravagance from de Max, and from the drag shows and music halls of Montmartre. He learned about everything up-to-date by moving in the circle of the poet and critic Apollinaire, whom he adored above all other men, with the exception of Picasso. (Picasso did not return the compliment.)
“Cocteau’s work is strewn with references,” writes François Nemer in the catalogue of this show. “These references are not taken from the further fringes of Western culture, but from its main, classical and academic trunk, the one that underpins the public education system and provides illustrated dictionaries with their imagery. They suggest not so much the elitist arrogance of a son of the cultivated bourgeoisie as the rather confined atmosphere and gentle nostalgia of a floor littered with open books, holiday souvenirs, photographs of friends and family and postcards in a sick child’s bedroom.”
At least he knew something. Intelligent young North Americans nowadays have very little general culture, or much easy acquaintance with history, art, mythology, architecture – things that, only a few decades ago, were acquired as a matter of course by anybody who wanted an intellectual life. Contemporary aesthetic culture takes little pleasure in Cocteau’s brand of light, broad learning. In due course, one suspects, generalists like him will probably disappear altogether, and we will be poorer for that. Even now, our taste for highly specialized learning and our suspicion of dilettantes disincline us to take anyone seriously who does it all. And Cocteau, indeed, did it all: wrote and directed plays, made his great film Le Sang d’un poète in 1930, decorated a chapel, designed a 20-centime French stamp. The diversity of his art-making has always been among the most grievous offences held against him by critics. (Another was letting himself be turned into a celebrity in the 1950s – but why not? Years of gazing at himself in the mirror had taught him how good he looked to the camera, and he did love to talk.)
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