Jean Cocteau

" We can never understand the people we love when we are with them, 
we can't take them as they are.
We expect them to live up to our dreams and expectations, but the rarely do.
The rarely share those dreams with us".

Jean Cocteau, so brilliant and polymath that he must be considered the first multimedia
virtuoso, made his spectacular debut in the Parisian world of arts and letters during the age
of Proust, but then rose to dominate it throughout the next forty years, a golden era in French
culture that ended in the 1950s.
As the creator of such brilliant, watershed films as THE BLOOD OF A POET (1930), 
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (1946), LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES (1949), and ORPHÉE (1949-50),
the quintessentially Parisian Cocteau has long been acclaimed for its power to make artistic
statements of universal expressiveness.  

In addition to its numerous volumes of pure verse, this extraordinary artist wrote novels, 
plays, journalism, criticism, scenarios for ballet, opera, and film; further, he made 
thousands of drawings, painted canvases, and decorated chapels, modelled clay, collaged
sculpture, and designed both sets and costumes.
Throughout this vast varied production, Cocteau never viewed himself as other than Poet,
an imaginative form-giver for whom everyday reality existed solely as an opportunity to discover
and reveal its hidden beauties.

In Cocteau's world, life was theatre and theatre life, with every act performed by the poet
in full public view. The legacy of this bravura existence is a treasure trove of
images-portraits in oil, pencil, and film, candid shots of grouped friends and enemies, stills
from plays, ballets, and movies, news photos, posters, and programs, Cocteau's own classically
linear intensely homo-erotic drawings, and the art of Bakst and Picasso that inspired them.

Cocteau conceived the circus ballet PARADE (1917), a breakthrough work that inspired Apollinaire
to coin the term Surrealism. 
In LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES (1929) he wrote a novel of adolescence that became 
'The Catcher in the Rye' or The Outsider of the late twenties-early thirties generation.
While in THE WHITE BOOK of 1928 he anticipated the torrid confessions of Jean Genet. 
It was anonymously printed in 1928.

Automatism was a process that Cocteau himself perfected in OPIUM (1930), a journal of his
harrowing withdrawal from drug addiction and an album of his most remarkable drawings.
While the play ORPHÉE (1928) and the successors Cocteau wrote introduced Greek drama into 
post-Freudian, modern-dress theatre, THE BLOOD OF A POET prefigured every film fantasist 
from Orson Welles to Steven Spielberg.

He worked with all the great artists of his era, from Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Satie and Picasso
to Apollinaire, Radiguit, Gide and Truffaut. 
But no matter what form of artistic expression Cocteau chose to use, he left his personal stamp
upon it in some inimitable way.
He died at Milly-la-Fôret, near Fontainebleau, on October 11, 1963.