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, screenwriter, novelist, designer, film director, visual artist and critic. He was one of the foremost avant-garde artists of the 20th century and highly influential on the Surrealist and Dadaist movements, among others. The National Observer suggested that "of the artistic generation whose daring gave birth to Twentieth Century Art, Cocteau came closest to being a Renaissance man".
He is most notable for his novels Le Grand Écart (1923), Le Livre blanc (1928), and Les Enfants Terribles (1929); the stage plays La Voix Humaine (1930), La Machine Infernale (1934), Les Parents terribles (1938), La Machine à écrire (1941), and L'Aigle à deux têtes (1946); and the films The Blood of a Poet (1930), Les Parents Terribles (1948), Beauty and the Beast (1946), Orpheus (1950), and Testament of Orpheus (1960), which alongside Blood of a Poet and Orpheus constitute the so-called Orphic Trilogy. He was described as "one of [the] avant-garde's most successful and influential filmmakers" by AllMovie. Cocteau, according to Annette Insdorf, "left behind a body of work unequalled for its variety of artistic expression".
Though his body of work encompassed many different media, Cocteau insisted on calling himself a poet, classifying the great variety of his works — poems, novels, plays, essays, drawings, films — as poésie, poésie de roman, poésie de thêatre, poésie critique, poésie graphique and poésie cinématographique.
Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, to Georges Cocteau and Eugénie Lecomte, a socially prominent Parisian family. His father, a lawyer and amateur painter, died by suicide when Cocteau was nine. From 1900 to 1904, Cocteau attended the Lycée Condorcet where he met and began a relationship with schoolmate Pierre Dargelos, who reappeared throughout Cocteau's work "John Cocteau: Erotic Drawings".
He left home at fifteen. He published his first volume of poems, Aladdin's Lamp, at nineteen. Cocteau soon became known in Bohemian artistic circles as The Frivolous Prince, the title of a volume he published at twenty-two. Edith Wharton described him as a man "to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundation of the Heavenly City..."
In his early twenties, Cocteau became associated with the writers Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Maurice Barrès. In 1912, he collaborated with Léon Bakst on Le Dieu bleu for the Ballets Russes; the principal dancers being Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky. During World War I, Cocteau served in the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. This was the period in which he met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, artists Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Bernard Buffet, and numerous other writers and artists with whom he later collaborated.
Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev persuaded Cocteau to write a scenario for a ballet, which resulted in Parade in 1917. It was produced by Diaghilev, with sets by Picasso, the libretto by Apollinaire and the music by Erik Satie. "If it had not been for Apollinaire in uniform," wrote Cocteau, "with his skull shaved, the scar on his temple and the bandage around his head, women would have gouged our eyes out with hairpins."
An important exponent of avant-garde art, Cocteau had great influence on the work of others, including a group of composers known as Les Six. In the early twenties, he and other members of Les Six frequented a wildly popular bar named Le Boeuf sur le Toit, a name that Cocteau himself had a hand in picking. The popularity was due in no small measure to the presence of Cocteau and his friends.
Friendship with Raymond Radiguet
In 1918, he met the French poet Raymond Radiguet. They collaborated on literary projects, socialized, and traveled together. Cocteau also assisted in obtaining Radiguet's exemption from military service. Admiring of Radiguet's great literary talent, Cocteau promoted his friend's works in his artistic circle and arranged for the publication by Grasset of Le Diable au corps, a largely autobiographical story of an adulterous relationship between a married woman and a younger man, exerting his influence to have the novel awarded the "Nouveau Monde" literary prize. Some contemporaries and later commentators thought there might have been a romantic component to their friendship. Cocteau himself was aware of this perception, and worked earnestly to dispel the notion that their relationship was sexual in nature.
There is disagreement over Cocteau's reaction to Radiguet's sudden death in 1923, with some claiming that it left him stunned, despondent and prey to opium addiction. Opponents of that interpretation point out that he did not attend the funeral (he generally did not attend funerals) and immediately left Paris with Diaghilev for a performance of Les noces (The Wedding) by the Ballets Russes at Monte Carlo.
His opium addiction at the time, Cocteau said, was only coincidental, due to a chance meeting with Louis Laloy, the administrator of the Monte Carlo Opera. Cocteau's opium use and his efforts to stop profoundly changed his literary style. His most notable book, Les Enfants Terribles, was written in a week during a strenuous opium weaning.
In Opium: Diary of a Cure, he recounts the experience of his recovery from opium addiction in 1929. His account, which includes vivid pen-and-ink illustrations, alternates between his moment-to-moment experiences of drug withdrawal and his current thoughts about people and events in his world. Cocteau was supported throughout his recovery by his friend and correspondent, Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Under Maritain's influence, Cocteau made a temporary return to the sacraments of the Catholic Church. With Maritain, he founded the literary magazine Le Roseau d'Or. He again returned to the Church later in life and undertook a number of religious art projects.
On 15 June 1926 Cocteau's play Orphée was staged in Paris. It was quickly followed by an exhibition of drawings and "constructions" called Poésie plastique–objets, dessins. Cocteau wrote the libretto for Igor Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus rex, which had its original performance in the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris on 30 May 1927. In 1929 one of his most celebrated and well-known works, the novel Les Enfants terribles was published.
In 1930 Cocteau made his first film The Blood of a Poet, publicly shown in 1932. Though now generally accepted as a surrealist film, the surrealists themselves did not accept it as a truly surrealist work. Although this is one of Cocteau's best-known works, his 1930s are notable rather for a number of stage plays, above all La Voix humaine and Les Parents terribles, which was a popular success. His 1934 play La Machine infernale was Cocteau's stage version of the Oedipus legend and is considered to be his greatest work for the theatre. During this period Cocteau also published two volumes of journalism, including Mon Premier Voyage: Tour du Monde en 80 jours, a neo-Jules Verne around the world travel reportage he made for the newspaper Paris-Soir.
From the 1920s Cocteau began to illustrate his own literary works, developing an economical use of line to create figurative form from minimal strokes. An illustrated edition of his novel Thomas l’imposteur was published in 1927, followed by Opium and Le Livre blanc in 1930. In 1935, Cocteau’s 60 illustrations for his 1929 novel Les Enfants terribles were published as a portfolio edition. Cocteau’s visual language also became integral to his cinema, beginning with Le Sang d’un poète in 1932 and continuing through later works including his 1946 film La Belle et la Bête and Orphée in 1950.
Throughout his life, Cocteau tried to maintain a distance from political movements, confessing to a friend that "my politics are non-existent". According to Claude Arnaud, from the 1920s on, Cocteau's only deeply held political convictions were a marked pacifism and antiracism. He praised the French republic for serving as a haven for the persecuted, and applauded Picasso's anti-war painting Guernica as a cross that "Franco would always carry on his shoulder". In 1940, Cocteau signed a petition circulated by the Ligue internationale contre l'antisémitisme (International League Against Antisemitism) which protested the rise of racism and antisemitism in France, and declared himself "ashamed of his white skin" after witnessing the plight of colonized peoples during his travels.