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A comprehensive biography of Jean Cocteau, a French poet, playwright, novelist, film director, and visual artist. Learn about his life, works, influences, and legacy in the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements.
- Overview
- Heritage and youth
- Influence of Radiguet
- Filmmaking in the 1940s
Jean Cocteau (born July 5, 1889, Maisons-Laffitte, near Paris, France—died October 11, 1963, Milly-la-Forêt, near Paris) French poet, librettist, novelist, actor, film director, and painter. Some of his most important works include the poem L’Ange Heurtebise (1925; “The Angel Heurtebise”); the play Orphée (1926; Orpheus); the novels Les Enfants ter...
Cocteau grew up in Paris and always considered himself Parisian by speech, education, ideas, and habits. His family was of the solid Parisian bourgeoisie—cultivated, wealthy, and interested in music, painting, and literature.
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Cocteau’s earliest memories had to do with the theatre, in popular forms, such as the circus and the ice palace, as well as serious theatre, such as the tragedies performed at the Comédie-Française. At age 19 he published his first volume of poems, La Lampe d’Aladin (“Aladdin’s Lamp”).
Cocteau was the product of the years immediately preceding World War I, years of refined artistic taste that were devoid of political turmoil. His real exploration of the world of the theatre began when he encountered the Ballets Russes, then under the direction of Sergey Diaghilev. When Cocteau expressed a desire to create ballets, Diaghilev challenged him to “étonne-moi” (“surprise me”). This famous remark seems to have guided the poet not only in his ballets, such as Parade (1917), with music by Erik Satie, and Le Boeuf sur le toit (1920; “The Ox on the Roof”), with music by Darius Milhaud, but also in his other works; and it is sometimes quoted in his plays and films.
During World War I, Cocteau served as an ambulance driver on the Belgian front. The landscape he observed there was later used in his novel Thomas l’imposteur (1923; Thomas the Imposter or The Imposter). He became a friend of the aviator Roland Garros and dedicated to him the early poems inspired by aviation, Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance (1919; The Cape of Good Hope). At intervals during the years 1916 and 1917, Cocteau entered the world of modern art, then being born in Paris; in the bohemian Montparnasse section of the city, he met painters such as Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani and writers such as Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire.
Soon after the war, Max Jacob introduced Cocteau to the future poet and novelist Raymond Radiguet. The 16-year-old Radiguet, who appeared to be a prodigy, advocated an aesthetic of simplicity and of classical clarity, qualities that would become characteristic of Cocteau’s own work. The example of Radiguet counted tremendously for Cocteau; and when Radiguet died in 1923, at age 21, the older man felt bereft of a friendship that had been based upon a constant interchange of ideas, encouragement, and enthusiasms.
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An addiction to opium, brought on by Cocteau’s grief over his lover’s death, necessitated a period of cure. Jacques Maritain, a French Thomist philosopher, paid his first visit to Cocteau in the sanatorium. Through Maritain, Cocteau returned briefly to religious practice. These complex experiences initiated a new period in his life, during which he produced some of his most important works. In the long poem L’Ange Heurtebise the poet engages in a violent combat with an angel that was to reappear continually in his works. His play Orphée, first performed in 1926, was destined to play a part in the resurrection of tragedy in contemporary theatre; in it, Cocteau deepened his interpretation of the nature of the poet. The novel Les Enfants terribles, written in the space of three weeks in March 1929, is the study of the inviolability of the character of two adolescents, the brother and sister Paul and Elisabeth. In 1950 Cocteau prepared the screenplay for a film of this work, and he was also the film’s narrator.
In the 1940s Cocteau returned to filmmaking, first as a screenwriter and then also as a director in La Belle et la bête, a fantasy based on the children’s tale, and Orphée (1949), a re-creation of the themes of poetry and death that he had dealt with in his play.
Also a visual artist of significance, Cocteau in 1950 decorated the Villa Santo Sospir in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat and began a series of important graphic works: frescoes on the City Hall in Menton, the Chapel of Saint-Pierre in Villefranche-sur-Mer, and the Church of Saint-Blaise-des-Simples in Milly-la-Forêt. His adopted son, the painter Édouard Dermit, who also appears in his later films, continued the decoration of a chapel at Fréjus, a work Cocteau had not completed at his death at age 74.
- Wallace Fowlie
Apr 25, 2024 · Learn about the life and work of Jean Cocteau, a versatile and influential artist who played a role in Surrealism, Dada, and Cubism. Discover his early trauma, his relationships, his films, and his legacy.
Learn about Jean Cocteau, a French poet, novelist, painter, graphic artist, playwright and filmmaker who worked across many artistic disciplines and explored myth, dream and sexual identity. Discover his achievements, controversies, influences and legacy through his paintings, ballets, films and books.
- French
- July 5, 1889
- Maisons-Laffitte, France
- October 11, 1963
Learn about Jean Cocteau, a versatile and influential figure of French Expressionism, who wrote novels, plays, poems, and film scripts. Explore his artworks, collaborations, and biography on Wikiart.org.
- French
- July 5, 1889
- Maisons-Laffitte, France
- October 11, 1963
Jean Cocteau had a wide-ranging career as a poet, dramatist, screenwriter, and novelist. “Cocteau’s willingness and ability to turn his hand to the most disparate creative ventures,” James P. Mc Nab wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, “do not fit the stereotypical image of the priestlike—or Proust-like—writer single ...
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Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (UK: KOK-toh, US: kok-TOH; French: [ʒɑ̃ mɔʁis øʒɛn klemɑ̃ kɔkto]; 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, film director, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost artists of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements and an ...
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