Jean Cocteau Biography and List of Works

French artist and writer, who made his name widely known in poetry, fiction, film, ballet, painting, and opera. Cocteau's works reflect the influence of surrealism, psychoanalysis, Catholic Religion, and the use of opium.

"The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood."
(from Le Rappel à l'Ordre, 1926)

Cocteau was born in Maisons-Lafitte into a wealthy Parisian family. His father was a lawyer and amateur painter, who committed suicide when Cocteau was nine. Cocteau's father had a lasting influence on his son, but according to psychoanalytical critics this tragic event also created his desire to put himself in the service of the performing arts and the mysterious forces in the universe. In the secondary school Cocteau was only a mediocre student who was unsuccessful after repeated attempts to pass the graduation examination. His first volume of poems, Aladdin's Lamp, Cocteau published at the age of 19.

Soon Cocteau became known as 'The Frivolous Prince' - the title of a volume of poems he had published at twenty-one. In 1915 he met Picasso and fell under his spell. "I admired his intelligence, and clung to everything he said, for he spoke little; I kept still so as not to miss a word. There were long silences and Varèse could not understand why we stared wordlessly at each other. In talking, Picasso used a visual syntax, and you could immediately see what he was saying. He liked formulas and summoned himself up in his statements as he summoned himself up and sculptured himself in objects that he immediately made tangible." (from Pablo Picasso by Pierre Cabanne, 1977)

The Russian ballet-master Sergei Diaghilev challenged Cocteau to write for the ballet. This resulted Parade (1917), a ballet produced by Diaghilev, sets by Pablo Picasso, and music by Erik Satie. In 1919 appeared LE POTOMAK, a prose fantasy centering on a creature, which lives caged in an aquarium. The book established Cocteau's reputation as a writer. The theme of the poet's ability to see clearly into the world of the dead was a central theme is Cocteau's early poems, such as in 'L'ange Heurtebise' (1925). Cocteau's first major work of criticism, LE RAPPEL À L'ORDRE, was published in 1926.

During World War I Cocteau served as an ambulance driver on the Belgian front. Soon after the war he met the future poet and novelist Raymond Radiguet, whose early death led him to an addiction to opium and a period of cure. He turned in the 1920s to the psychological novel with Thomas the Impostor (1923), and LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES (1929), a terrifying story of four children who become trapped in their own spooky world. He also collaborated with Stravinsky on Oedipus-Rex, an opera-oratoria. In 1929 he was hospitalized for opium poison, and depicted his addiction in OPIUM (1930).

In the 1930s Cocteau started to make films, first of which, The Blood of a Poet, was based on his own private mythology. Typical for Coctaeau's films was the use of a mirror as a door into another world and the play between reality and the underworld or the inner world where poetry is made. The hostility of the surrealist led Cocteau to abandon the avant-garde for something closer to classicism. His greatest play, The Infernal Machine, was written before WW II, and presented Oedipus as a marionette in the play of the gods. The work was based on Oedipus Rex by the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles.

As the result of a bet with the newspaper Paris-Soir, Cocteau completed the itinery imagined by Jules Verne in Around the World in Eighty Days, depicting his travels in My First Voyage (1936). His close friendship with young Jean Marais started in 1937, when Marais played the role in the play Knights of the Round Table, and he designed since then roles especially for Marais in his succeeding works.

In the 1940s Cocteau returned to filmmaking, producing Beauty and the Beast (1946), ORPHÉE (1950), and LE TESTAMENT D'ORPHÉE (1961), in which he played himself on the screen. The film dealt with one of Cocteau's favourite theme, the death, which he called his 'mistress'. "As I grow shorter, she grows longer, she takes up more room, she worries about little details, she busies herself with unimportant, trivial tasks. She makes less and less of an effort to deceive me. But her hour of triumph will be that in which I cease to be. Then she can consider her troubles over and done with, and leave, shutting the door behind her."

Cocteau continued leading an active life until 1953 when ill health forced him into semiretirement. He had his face lifted and he started to wear leather trousers and matador's capes. In his last decade Cocteau worked in a wide variety of graphic arts. He was elected in 1955 to Belgian Academy and the Acadèmie Française. Cocteau died in Milly, outside Paris, on October 11, 1963. He was preparing a radio broadcast in memory of Edith Piaf and when he head she had expired, he exclaimed: 'Ah, la Piaf est morte, je peux mourir', and sank into a coronary himself. Cocteaus's last film was his faithful adaptation of the novel from Madame de La Fayette, The Princess of Cleves.

For further reading: Jean Cocteau: The History of a Poet's Age by W. Fowlie (1966); An Impersonation of Angels by F. Brown (1968); Jean Cocteau by R. Gilson (1969); Cocteau: a Biography by F. Steegmuller (1970); Jean Cocteau by W. Fitfield (1976); Jean Cocteau and His Films of Orphic Identity by A.B. Evans (1977); The Esthetic of Jean Cocteau by L. Crowson (1978) - See also: Colette, Andre Bréton - "To enclose the collected works of Cocteau one would need not a bookshelf, but a warehouse..." (W.H. Auden)

LAMPE D'ALADIN, (1908)