When the madcap American heiress and audacious art collector Peggy Guggenheim founded her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, in London, her adviser Marcel Duchamp proposed she inaugurate the space with a Jean Cocteau show. To make the necessary arrangements, Guggenheim visited the protean artist in Paris, where he received her in bed in an opium haze. In time for the opening on January 24, 1938, Cocteau sent his patron a series of drawings related to his recent play Knights of the Round Table, along with his largest work to date, Fear Giving Wings to Courage. But this ambitious picture, rendered on a cotton bedsheet in pencil, chalk, crayon, and—apparently—blood, never made it into the show. Deemed obscene and confiscated by British customs agents, the figurative allegory was finally released to Duchamp and Guggenheim, on condition that they not exhibit it publicly. According to Guggenheim, “It was not the nude but the pubic hairs which worried them.”
This banned artwork now serves as the centerpiece to “Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge,” an exhibition that opens today at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, in Venice. Curated by the N.Y.U. art historian and Cocteau specialist Kenneth E. Silver, it’s the most comprehensive retrospective of the Frenchman’s oeuvre ever organized in Italy, bringing together a trove of images and objects that would have given the British censors pause. Among the risqué rarities on view are a copy of Cocteau’s anonymously written homoerotic 1928 novel, Le Livre Blanc; studies of bare-bottomed, randy sailors; a 1936 depiction of the artist’s partner smoking opium in the buff (pubic hair included); and issues of American 1950s “physique” magazines, embellished with the artist’s libidinous scribbles.
“There is a magnetic pull to Cocteau in the gay world,” Silver states. “For all those decades preceding Stonewall, there was no public figure who was as out as Cocteau. He wrote about queer things, let people see him on the arm of other men. For a long time that was about as good as it got for queer people.”
The show’s allusive title refers to the artist’s posthumous “revenge,” not only on the homophobic straight world—one French critic called Cocteau a “degenerate buffoon”—but also on the international art establishment, which, during his lifetime and well beyond, maligned him for his preternatural versatility and his unapologetic commercialism. (He collaborated with brands such as Hermès and Limoges and even shilled for a television manufacturer.) As Cocteau partisan and fellow gay poet W. H. Auden noted, Cocteau’s detractors often resorted to labeling the artist-of-all-trades “a dilettante.” And being accused of dilettantism, Silver says, “was the same as calling someone queer.”
For a clarification of the title’s “juggler” reference, visitors don’t need to look beyond the museum banners and catalogue cover, both of which reproduce a surrealistic photograph by Philippe Halsman, commissioned by Life magazine in 1949, that portrays Cocteau as a six-armed marvel, simultaneously balancing scissors, a book, pen, paintbrush, and a cigarette in each long-fingered hand. To the critics who charged the pan-media practitioner with “jumping from branch to branch” like an acrobatic monkey, the artist replied, “Well, I have, but always in the same tree.”
One motif that threads through every medium that Cocteau mastered is the myth of Orpheus, the enchanting Thracian musician whom he adopted as an alter ego. At the entrance to the exhibition, Silver has displayed the scene from Cocteau’s 1950 cinematic masterpiece, Orpheus, in which the movie star (and Cocteau’s boyfriend) Jean Marais passes through a looking glass to the underworld. The monstrance-like Orpheus’s Mirror, a sculpture made of gilt-bronze, silver, and copper, and etched with twinned profiles that can also be read as a Rubin’s vase, glistens in a nearby vitrine. The final, flamboyant Orphic treasure is a gem-studded golden sword, executed for Cocteau in 1955 by Cartier (an exhibition sponsor). Designed by the poet for his induction into the Académie Française, the ceremonial épée is embellished at the hilt with Orpheus’s sinuous silhouette and on its pommel with the doomed hero’s magical lyre, on which, according to legend, the demi-god’s decapitated head floated to Lesbos, still singing.
Silver wisely allows his verbally dexterous subject to have the last word. At the conclusion of the show a shorter film unspools, the 23-minute 1962 valedictory monologue, “Jean Cocteau Addresses the Year 2000,” recorded a year before the artist died. “If I have the good fortune to live on in your minds,” Cocteau tells his audience of the future—which, in fact, is the exhibition’s audience—“it would be in mythological form…. I don’t believe in death because I feel it is one of the many forms of life.” Silver proposes that Cocteau foresaw his legacy. “Cocteau’s art keeps him alive always,” Silver asserts. “He lives in the eternal present.”
“Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge” is on at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, in Venice, until September 16
Amy Fine Collins is an Editor at Large at AIR MAIL. She is the author of The International Best-Dressed List: The Official Story