Jean cocteau orpheus
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1949
Jean Cocteau was a hugely influential French writer, playwright, designer, and filmmaker. He was close friends and collaborator with a wide range of artists, composers, and personalities including Pablo Picasso, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, Édith Piaf, Colette, Jean Genet, Igor Stravinsky, and Gertrude Stein.
Other Photographs
Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Sittings
Jean Cocteau
Writer, Playwright, Poet, Painter, Producer, Etc.
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Summary of Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau worked across almost every artistic discipline, exploring writing, painting and drawing, theatre and film, linking disparate forms of art making in explorations of myth, contemporary life, dream and sexual identity. Cocteau began as a poet but aspired toward the creation of worlds into which an audience could be immersed. He drew from many influences, filtering the world around him through his personal sensibility and life experiences. Cocteau, though controversial among his peers due to his eagerness to please, valued collaboration and his receptivity to the ideas of others is evident throughout his body of work, which broke new ground in creating links between different styles, media and periods.
Accomplishments
- Cocteau aspired to create "total works of art," extending Richard Wagner's concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, then more familiar in theory than in practice, combining words, images and movements in multiple dimensions. This led him to direct ballet and film, illustrate his own books and decorate interiors, all of which provided the
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Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was born on July 5, in 1889 (d.1963). Cocteau was a French poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist and critic. Cocteau drew on a negative which Karsh used to create this final image.
Karsh wrote: “Time did not permit me, in 1949, to photograph M. Cocteau in his beautiful country home and he, of course, was busy with a thousand things… this master-of-all-arts and insatiable experimenter with life. We arranged, therefore, to take the pictures in a friend’s apartment, directly about Cocteau’s tiny Paris office.
“As a stage and film director, and in later years a painter, he understood at once what I was trying to do. He looked on with interest as the lighting was prepared and backgrounds chose, but, an old ‘pro’ himself, he did not attempt to direct me and I was pleased to have his confidence. He chatted freely about many things, his thoughts bubbling over, and his face, infinitely expressive, altering momentarily with his mood.”
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