This fifth exhibition on Jean Cocteau is special.
When in 2011 the Cocteau Museum in Menton decided to exhibit the donation of Séverin Wunderman, the works were so numerous that it was decided to spread them across several themes, one per year, in order to show the public most of the Wunderman collection. The artist and the collector being this fifth and ultimate stage. A new cycle is promised for next year.
Collector! It was actually through an encounter with a drawing by Cocteau that Séverin Wunderman, then a watchmaker, began his immense collection. This drawing is also the poster for the 2015-2016 exhibition. The artist and the collector, or rather the collector evoking the artist.
Indeed, through five themes, the five chapters of a marvelous picture book, we will discover a more intimate Jean Cocteau: A collection of encounters, this first meeting already mentioned, this drawing bought with his paycheck, leaving him with not a cent for his household.
There is also Cocteau and his contemporaries, illustration and Potomak posters, the poet is also an artist and his poetry evolves, he becomes a polemicist in the middle of the 1st World War, daring with this pun on Joffre, today it makes us laugh, but back then?
The theater where anything is possible and Cocteau stages it with a fascination for mythology. The novel, the cinema, friends, friendships, do not confuse Jean Cocteau’s relations with Picasso and those with Edmond Radiguet or Jean Marais.(1)
The South! This region bathed by the Mediterranean, found nowhere else, captivated the artists, Cocteau, Colette, Picasso. Santo Sospir, Saint Jean Cap Ferrat, the wedding hall in Menton, the Bastion, the first setting that housed his works, the fishermen’s chapel in Villefranche, reveal a Cocteau imbued with spirituality.
He tries his hand at painting with a portrait, of whom? He created a character and Madame Favini becomes real. Finally, the Testament of Orpheus: Don’t ask why, said Cocteau? Testament of this immense artist with a thousand talents.
The ideal conclusion to this exhibition. “The divine friendship is not the fact of a world. Who will always be amazed? And always this world will confuse,
Our friendships and our loves.” Jean Cocteau (1)
by ThierryJan
