Jean Cocteau 1889 - 1963

Jean Cocteau was one of the 20th century's most remarkable artists: painter, poet, dramatist, composer, film-maker and theatre designer, his talent was almost as endless as his desire to express himself. Cocteau was born into a wealthy family, but any chances of his becoming a contented bourgeois were shattered when his father committed suicide when Jean was just 10 years old. By the age of fourteen, Cocteau had been expelled from school and had run away to the red-light district of Marseilles, where he undoubtedly first acquired the taste for eroticism and violence that forms a thread through his art, his films and his life. Cocteau returned to his family, but with his eyes firmly on moving to Paris and entering its bohemian world of artists, writers and actors. Despite having no formal artistic training, Cocteau managed to persuade a number of leading figures in the Parisian art scene to take a chance on him, most famously the Russian impresario, Sergei Diaghilev, owner of the Ballets Russes, who asked Cocteau to 'Ettonne -moi' - 'Surprise Me' - which he did by writing the libretto for the exotic ballet Le Dieu Bleu. In 1917, Cocteau met Picasso, who was working on the sets for Diaghilev's ground-breaking ballet Parade, and the two artists would continue to inspire and annoy each other for the next forty years, until Cocteau's death in 1963. In the 30s and early 40s, as Picasso became ever more influential, Cocteau descended into a world of indolent decadence and opium addiction. He was rescued by his relationship with the young actor, Jean Marais, whose strong profile and mischievous eyes would become the model for almost all the fauns and mythological heroes of Cocteau's classically-inspired work of the 50s. It was Marais who was the model for almost all Cocteau's images of his artistic 'alter-ego' - Orpheus. Orpheus is perhaps art's first tragic hero, equally cursed and blessed with a divine talent for music that see him challenge the gods and fail, losing everything in the process. For Cocteau, who had lost many close friends and lovers, the story of Orpheus was bitter-sweet allegory of his own life, where death eventually triumphs over art, no matter how beautiful. It was in the 50s that Cocteau also became seriously interested in ceramics. He had always been fascinated by the simplicity and purity of form of Etruscan pottery and, in 1956, whilst renting a house in Villefranche-sur-mer in the South of France, he discovered the small local atelier, run by Philippe Madeline and his wife Marie-Madeleine Jolly, where he felt "protected from the tempests of the world" and far way from "town fever". Like Picasso at the Madoura pottery in Vallauris, Cocteau had found somewhere informal and unpretentious, where he could be free to experiment in a new medium. Never constrained by working in a new form, Cocteau was as restless and inventive as ever, creating new materials, such as an oxide pencil, in order to capture in ceramic the textures and sweeping lines of his drawing. He also revived the ancient Etruscan technique of mixing clay with various oxides to make coloured terracotta. Indeed, he was so enthusiastic that Madeline had to stop him from coming to the atelier every day, so that the ceramics would have a day to cool after firing. Cocteau created hundreds of ceramics in the years he was in Villefranche and was working on them right up to his death in 1963. Both Picasso and Cocteau are central figures in the French avant-garde of the 20th century and they are linked not only by their friendship but also by their ability to create works of art out of anything that came to hand. Cocteau can also be seen as one of the century's first multi-media artists and was deeply influential in bringing Modernist ideas such as surrealism, psychoanalysis, drug-induced hallucination and erotica to art, poetry and, especially, cinema.