Jean Cocteau (Art Memoir) Book

When Jean Cocteau first met Picasso during the First World War, he was so eager to impress that he arrived at the brilliant young Spaniard's studio dressed as a harlequin. This anecdote says a great deal about Cocteau, one of the century's great modernists. Picasso went on to incorporate the harlequin into some of his greatest cubist paintings, an example of Cocteau's silent mediation in so many of the decisive moments within 20th-century modernism. Cocteau's own assumption of the role of the harlequin also says much about his own dazzling, but often ambiguous character, an image of the artist captured in Patrick Mauries' short illustrated biography, Jean Cocteau. Mauries' book is a fine reflection of Cocteau's own artistic career--a slight, beautiful, poetic book, made up of a short allusive biographical essay, supplemented by illustrations of Cocteau, his friends, his lovers, and his art. Mauries' biography offers very little not already covered in Francis Steegmuller's classic work, Cocteau: A Biography, and tends to drift into speculation on Cocteau's relationship with his father and his slavery to fashion, while lacking a stronger sense of chronology and his development as an artist. However, the book is saved by a wonderfully idiosyncratic collection of illustrations, which emphasise the highly personal nature of Mauries' study. Photographs of Cocteau sculpting with pipe-cleaners, and Jean Marais erotically clad in strips of cloth artfully knotted by Coco Chanel for the performance of Oedipe Roi, offer a strangely poignant reflection of the artist's own career: elegant, enchanting, intense and erotic, yet strangely frustrating, and often produced with the hope of media exposure never far away. Mauries' book may not be the most comprehensive introduction to Cocteau, but it offers aficionados a telling perspective on one of the greats of French modernism. --Jerry BrottonRead More