A Dandy for Our Times

Even if we view Cocteau’s superficiality as a precocious form of Postmodernism, or as a forgivable vice, as this show asks us to do, should we be quite so ready to write off his behaviour during the Occupation as a peccadillo? I bring up this matter because the exhibition does. Over the last decade or so, writers in Europe and America have made a blood sport out of exposing the suspicious, or worse, wartime doings of respected artists and intellectuals. Martin Heidegger, Paul de Man, even Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas – all of them have been revealed to have nasty secrets in their steamer trunks. Cocteau was no Nazi, as Heidegger was. He mostly just went along. His one conspicuous act of collaboration, memorialized by this show in photos and text, was the lavish public welcome he extended, in 1942, to the German sculptor Arno Breker, court artist to the Nazi regime in Berlin, on the occasion of a Breker show in Paris.

The show’s curators deal with the Breker affair as a lapse in judgment. But it was more plausibly a symptom of the deeper, long-lasting malaise in Cocteau’s life and work. His art, from start to finish, was altogether too fashionable and au courant, too dreamy and escapist and respectful of power. He bled at the least social slight, and he never forgot a wound, but he seems not to have been capable of mature doubt, about himself or anyone else. The show’s curator, Dominique Païni, excuses the artist by claiming that “deep down, Cocteau did not believe in anything.” But, no, it was Picasso who really did not believe in anything. Cocteau believed, with the blind passion of a convert, in the cultic power of art and artificiality, the magic power of evasion. While he cannot be blamed for general French complicity with the Nazis, neither can he be completely excused. He was, after all, a cultural icon throughout his life. He was no less responsible for the ways he used his highly public image because, as Païni writes, “he could not bear the idea of not being loved.”

If, these days, museums do not collect his drawings and paintings, nobody reads his poetry, and his plays are staged only occasionally, Cocteau’s cinema has long been important to experimental filmmakers in America, and interesting to everyone who enjoys films made before yesterday. (In a catalogue essay, Yann Beauvais makes a good argument for the genuinely innovative touch in Cocteau’s cinematic evocations of sexuality, childhood, and transformation.) But, outside the circles of film buffs and the audiences of Philip Glass, whom Cocteau has inspired more than once, how many people today see La Belle et la bête or Orphée when these works cycle through the local university screening room? Such over-civilized movies have never suited the crude temper of any century. Like the films of Joseph Cornell and James Broughton, they seem to need the affectionate atmosphere of the film club to live and persist.

The clubs are not, by the way, bad places for art to be. As long as the films of Cocteau are watched by bright students and young artists, and talked about and argued over, they will remain fresh and vital. I do not believe, however, that the drawings and photographs and other mementoes in the mmfa exhibition will be talked about beyond the show’s close, at the end of August. When he put pencil or pen to paper, Cocteau drew with lazy refinement, and with hardly a trace of the imaginative vigour and breadth of a Matisse or Picasso or Modigliani. And the subjects of his photographs – the rich and the famous in his smart set, the beautiful boys and men he loved – may interest us, because of their role in a drama of modern times; but not the pictures themselves. It is for another generation to enjoy, without a skeptical smile, the visual imagination of the man who, late in life, wrote this little manifesto of evasion: “Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort, the trifling feeling of escape experienced at a masked ball. He distances himself from that which he feels and sees. He invents. He transfigures. He mythifies. He creates. He fancies himself an artist.”