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A 1949 {photograph} of Jean Cocteau, shot by Philippe Halsman for Life journal, playfully depicts the suave and influential Cocteau, a number one determine of the Twentieth-century French avant-garde, with a surreal variety of fingers, holding a pen, a paintbrush, scissors, a ebook and, after all, a lit cigarette.
That picture, now on posters throughout Venice, beckons passers-by to the exhibition “Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge,” on the Peggy Guggenheim Collection via Sept. 16. The present highlights the dexterity of the multitalented artist, author, filmmaker and jewellery and designer working fluidly throughout completely different media.
“Cocteau had type of a nasty rap as a dilettante — that accusation has haunted him,” stated Kenneth E. Silver, a historian who organized the present with Blake Oetting, one in all his doctoral college students at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. “Moving everywhere in the inventive map is a given with artists now, however Cocteau was doing it virtually earlier than everyone else.”
The museum’s curatorial crew supplied guided excursions of the exhibition final week to individuals of the Art for Tomorrow convention, an annual occasion based by The New York Times and convened by the Democracy & Culture Foundation; it came about in Venice this 12 months and targeted on the theme of imperfect magnificence. with panels moderated by Times journalists.
Perhaps finest recognized for his 1929 novel “Les Enfants Terribles” (“The Holy Terrors”) and the 1946 characteristic movie “La Belle et la Bête” (“Beauty and the Beast”), Cocteau was additionally a gifted and prodigious draftsman. Over the years, he produced nimble portraits of many in his circle, together with Picasso and Elsa Schiaparelli (with whom he collaborated in 1937 on the design of a brooch within the form of an eye fixed with a teardrop pearl). All of those works are represented within the present.
The exhibition additionally underscores the story of Cocteau’s queerness via his frank drawings of nude males in moments of straightforward intimacy (the artist neither hid his sexuality nor ever got here out). “Cocteau was not afraid of subjecting the male type to the identical types of eroticized gaze that feminine fashions are so usually subjected to,” Oetting stated. The final main Cocteau exhibition, in 2004 on the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Oetting added, came about in “a unique artwork world vis-à-vis questions of id than we’re in now.”
Indeed, Cocteau’s experiences as a homosexual man, and as a crossover determine between the Parisian institution into which he was born and the avant-garde, resonate with the exploration of outsiders broadly within the sixtieth International Art Exhibition on the Venice Biennale titled “Foreigners Everywhere,” organized by Adriano Pedrosa and on view via Nov. 24.
This alignment is serendipitous, however, in accordance with Karole Vail, the director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and a granddaughter of Peggy Guggenheim, the connection is “whole happenstance.”
Vail had the preliminary concept for the Cocteau exhibition, the most important ever in Italy, with greater than 150 works by and of him, a number of years in the past (earlier than Pedrosa was named curator of the Biennale). She was fascinated with exploring the friendship between the artist and her grandmother, who inaugurated her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, in London with a present of Cocteau drawings in 1938, on the recommendation of their mutual buddy Marcel Duchamp.
In her 1979 memoir “Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict,” Guggenheim recounted: “The preparations for the Cocteau present have been reasonably troublesome. To converse to Cocteau, one needed to go to his lodge within the Rue de Cambon and attempt to discuss to him whereas he lay in mattress, smoking opium.”
Cocteau would ultimately ship her drawings of costumes and furnishings he designed for his 1937 play “Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde” (“The Knights of the Round Table”), and an enigmatic allegorical drawing in graphite, chalk, crayon and blood on a bedsheet he made particularly for Guggenheim’s exhibition, known as “Fear Giving Wings to Courage.”
The large-scale composition included a portrait of Cocteau’s longtime lover, the actor Jean Marais, with a fiery flock of hair and wearing mesh tank high and shorts amid a number of nude figures, and it received held up in British customs due to the pronounced depiction of pubic hair.
Guggenheim may solely get the piece launched by promising to hold it in her workplace, shielded from the general public, and he or she favored it a lot in the long run that she purchased the drawing. “It did provoke a scandal,” Vail stated, “and in some methods put Peggy’s gallery and her, finally, on the map.”
Cocteau, who fell in love with Venice at 15, would come to the town after World War II till his demise in 1963, visiting Guggenheim at her house within the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal, now the positioning of the museum.
The exhibition there, within the palazzo, shows quite a few drawings by Cocteau of gondoliers and Venetian cityscapes, in addition to a letter he wrote to Guggenheim round 1956 (lent from Vail’s private assortment), illustrated with an affectionate caricature of her in an enormous hat. The present additionally features a 1956 {photograph} of Cocteau on the roof terrace of Guggenheim’s palazzo and sporting a pair of her eccentric sun shades, believed to have been shot by Guggenheim herself.
“Fear Giving Wings to Courage,” on mortgage from the Phoenix Art Museum, the place it ended up after Guggenheim ultimately bought it to an American relative, now’s the large star, the 5-foot-by-8-foot sheet hanging by itself wall within the exhibition.
“The work is lastly capable of be seen in all its glory,” Oetting stated, noting how Marais’s styling seems to be just like that of homosexual males strolling round downtown New York right this moment. The story behind this work, he added, “is so indicative of the way in which that Cocteau himself has form of been held up within the again workplace of modernism.”
