Poet, artist, impresario, and our doorway from painting into cinema — he brought Picasso into Parade, gave the Return to Order its enduring name, and made films the New Wave generation studied as scripture.
Jean Cocteau was the great connector of Paris's avant-gardes — a poet, playwright, critic, designer, and eventually filmmaker who seemed to know everyone and to be present wherever the century turned. Born outside Paris in 1889, he was a salon celebrity by twenty and spent the war years attaching himself to the modern movement he would spend a decade explaining to fashionable Paris.
His pivotal act came in 1917, when he carried Pablo Picasso off to Rome to design Parade for the Ballets Russes — the collaboration that began Picasso's classical turn. Cocteau championed that turn in one of the first monographs on the painter, Picasso (1923) — the book whose early publication of Mother and Child keeps that painting public domain in the United States, and thus on our own pages. In 1926 he collected his postwar essays as Le rappel à l'ordre, and the era's swing back to classical calm had the name history kept. His relations with Breton's Surrealists stayed famously venomous — he was adjacent to their world, never of it.
The later career belongs to the cinema chapter we are only beginning: The Blood of a Poet (1930), Beauty and the Beast (1946), Orphée (1950).
They were films the postwar generation studied at the Cinémathèque, and a bridge that runs from the rue de Fleurus's paintings to the New Wave.
He died at Milly-la-Forêt on 11 October 1963, the day after Édith Piaf — a coincidence absorbed instantly into the mythology of both.
Painting
Modigliani's 1916 portrait of the twenty-six-year-old Jean Cocteau, painted during a friendly competition in Moïse Kisling's Montparnasse studio. Cocteau paid for it but left it behind. X-radiography later revealed a Kisling family portrait beneath the surface.
Film
Cocteau's fairy tale, made in the deprivations just after the Occupation: living caryatids, smoking candelabra held by human arms, and Jean Marais under the Beast's fur. The most beloved of his films — 'once upon a time' rendered with an avant-gardist's conviction that enchantment is a technique.
Film
Jean Cocteau turns the Orpheus myth into a postwar Paris dream: a famous poet, a Rolls-Royce, coded radio poems, motorcycle messengers, and a mirror that opens when touched with the right hands. It is the middle film of Cocteau's Orphic trilogy and the one where his private symbols become a story with the pull of a thriller.
Film · French avant-garde cinema
A drawing opens its mouth. The mouth slips into the artist's palm. A statue sends him through a mirror, where hotel rooms, a pistol, a snowball, an angel, and a card game turn art into bodily trouble. Cocteau's first film keeps slipping away from any single solution. It is a machine for making images think.
Ballet
The one-act ballet that dragged the avant-garde onto the popular stage: Cocteau's scenario, Satie's score with its typewriter and siren, and Picasso's Cubist curtain, sets, and costumes for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes — premiered in Paris in May 1917 to a scandalized house. In his program note, Guillaume Apollinaire described it as 'a kind of surrealism' — the word's first prominent appearance in print, and the name André Breton's movement later adopted. The Rome working trip also gave Picasso his first long look at the antique, helping initiate the classical turn that became the Return to Order.
Play
A woman talks through the night while the man she loves refuses to answer. Cocteau wrote the one-act for Piaf after meeting her in February 1940, recognizing that her power was the ability to make emotional exposure feel dangerous — one room, one wounded voice, an audience forced to listen. The play ties Cocteau to the history of French song: his theater and her chanson were the same instrument.
Drawing
Cocteau's Satie in a handful of lines: pince-nez, beard, and one finger raised as if delivering an aphorism — the composer of Parade drawn by its librettist, from the album Cocteau dedicated to Picasso.
Drawing
Picasso in his bowler, pipe clamped; Stravinsky monocled under a top hat, bowing into the conversation — two revolutions of the Ballets Russes years caught gossiping in Cocteau's single wandering line.
Met · 1915–1917
Cocteau sought Picasso out mid-war and by 1917 had carried him to Rome to design Parade for the Ballets Russes — the collaboration that opened the painter's classical turn. Cocteau's 1923 monograph on Picasso made the friendship a matter of public record.
Met · 1937
They met in 1937 when the young actor auditioned for Cocteau's theater — the beginning of a lifelong partnership that gave French cinema the Beast and Orphée.
Met · 1940
They met in February 1940, and within months Cocteau had written Le Bel Indifférent for her — the avant-garde's theater built around a street singer's voice. He died the day after she did, in October 1963.
Met · 1915–1917
The Parade partnership: Cocteau brought Satie the scenario and the two built the ballet with Picasso for Diaghilev — the collaboration credited in Satie's own hand on the manuscript's title page.
Supported by · 1959–1960
Truffaut put his 400 Blows money into Le Testament d'Orphée, Cocteau's last film, and is credited among its producers. Dixon has him giving his Cannes prize money after Cocteau worked behind the scenes for The 400 Blows at the 1959 festival; TCM has him donating the film's profits.
Supported by
The couple's film patronage extended to Cocteau: the Pompidou archive lists Le Sang d'un poète among the projects Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles financed.
Collaborated with
She illustrated a booklet by Cocteau, one of a run of book and stage commissions that continued through the end of the 1920s.
Met · 1938
Colette and Jean Cocteau were close friends and Palais-Royal neighbors from the late 1930s until her death in 1954, living around the same garden and writing admiringly of one another. Colette described his rooms in Paris de ma fenêtre.
Collaborated with · 1921–1960
Auric wrote the music for eleven Cocteau films, among them The Blood of a Poet (1930), Beauty and the Beast (1946), Orphée (1950), and Le Testament d'Orphée (1960). The two met through Les Six, the group of composers gathered around Cocteau and Erik Satie, and the first commission was the 1921 ballet Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel.
Sat for a portrait by · 1912
Jean Cocteau à l'époque de la grande roue, oil on canvas, painted when Cocteau was twenty-three, with the Ferris wheel of the 1900 exposition behind him. It is in the collection of the Musée national d'art moderne at the Centre Pompidou.
Art movement · c. 1918–1930
The tendency's namer, not its founder: his 1926 essay collection Le rappel à l'ordre supplied the phrase the era kept, and his Picasso monograph championed the classical turn as it happened.
Met · 1915–1917
Cocteau sought Picasso out mid-war and by 1917 had carried him to Rome to design Parade for the Ballets Russes — the collaboration that opened the painter's classical turn. Cocteau's 1923 monograph on Picasso made the friendship a matter of public record.
Associated with · 1917–1926
The tendency's namer, not its founder: his 1926 essay collection Le rappel à l'ordre supplied the phrase the era kept, and his Picasso monograph championed the classical turn as it happened.
Hosted gatherings at · 1922
The bar's own history records the circle of artists, musicians, poets and painters who gathered there weekly around Cocteau from its opening in January 1922 — the room was named for his and Darius Milhaud's 1920 stage spectacle.
Depicted in · 1916
Modigliani painted the twenty-six-year-old Cocteau at Kisling's Montparnasse studio in 1916. The portrait is now with the Pearlman collection at Princeton.
Met · 1937
They met in 1937 when the young actor auditioned for Cocteau's theater — the beginning of a lifelong partnership that gave French cinema the Beast and Orphée.
Met · 1940
They met in February 1940, and within months Cocteau had written Le Bel Indifférent for her — the avant-garde's theater built around a street singer's voice. He died the day after she did, in October 1963.
Met · 1915–1917
The Parade partnership: Cocteau brought Satie the scenario and the two built the ballet with Picasso for Diaghilev — the collaboration credited in Satie's own hand on the manuscript's title page.
Supported by · 1959–1960
Truffaut put his 400 Blows money into Le Testament d'Orphée, Cocteau's last film, and is credited among its producers. Dixon has him giving his Cannes prize money after Cocteau worked behind the scenes for The 400 Blows at the 1959 festival; TCM has him donating the film's profits.
Supported by
The couple's film patronage extended to Cocteau: the Pompidou archive lists Le Sang d'un poète among the projects Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles financed.
Collaborated with
She illustrated a booklet by Cocteau, one of a run of book and stage commissions that continued through the end of the 1920s.
Met · 1938
Colette and Jean Cocteau were close friends and Palais-Royal neighbors from the late 1930s until her death in 1954, living around the same garden and writing admiringly of one another. Colette described his rooms in Paris de ma fenêtre.
Collaborated with · 1921–1960
Auric wrote the music for eleven Cocteau films, among them The Blood of a Poet (1930), Beauty and the Beast (1946), Orphée (1950), and Le Testament d'Orphée (1960). The two met through Les Six, the group of composers gathered around Cocteau and Erik Satie, and the first commission was the 1921 ballet Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel.
Sat for a portrait by · 1912
Jean Cocteau à l'époque de la grande roue, oil on canvas, painted when Cocteau was twenty-three, with the Ferris wheel of the 1900 exposition behind him. It is in the collection of the Musée national d'art moderne at the Centre Pompidou.
