Exhibitions

When Jean Cocteau created Oedipus Rex in 1937, he went looking for someone to play the title role. He was captivated by Jean Marais, a young actor, athletic and sunlit, but wholly untried, and cast him in a silent part.

That meeting was the beginning of a deep bond, made of love, complicity, inspiration and respect, one that would outlast Jean Cocteau's death.

Nothing remains of Jean Marais's bedroom at Milly-la-Forêt. Yet it was he who found the house where Jean Cocteau settled in 1947, and he left behind the memory of a towering film star, adored in the 1950s, who simply came down to the village to pick up his newspaper.

Inside the house, an evocation of the friendship between the two Jeans unfolds through documents and objects that bear witness to it: everyday belongings, sculptures, drawings, photographs and archive images, staged and lit in the former bedroom, which opens onto the garden. Visitors will also discover a work by Jean Cocteau, drawn in chalk on a blackboard, revealed here for the first time.

Curators: GIP Maison Jean Cocteau, Muriel Genthon.
Scenography: Frédéric Beauclair.

The temporary exhibition "Prenez garde à la musique: The Musical Worlds of Jean Cocteau" let visitors hear and see the compositions and the musicians who accompanied the artist at every stage of his life.

Cocteau was neither composer nor performer, yet he played a major part in the artistic movements of twentieth-century music. As the "spiritual father" of Les Six, he discovered, nurtured and called forth new musical forms throughout his life. Fascinated by the modernity of artistic expression, he could not turn away from an art he never practised himself, unlike almost all the others.

It all begins in Cocteau's dreamlike, enchanted childhood, lulled by Rossini's piano, which his mother had inherited and played in the family home at Maisons-Laffitte. Every Sunday he also attended the Conservatoire concerts at the invitation of his grandfather, himself a cellist.

Before the First World War, he took part in the Ballets Russes as a librettist and, with Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in 1913, discovered a music that was expressive, modern, disconcerting… and that held him spellbound. The ballet Parade, created with Erik Satie and Pablo Picasso, marked the starting point of this new spirit.

In the fertile 1920s, Cocteau joined forces with six young musicians eager to break with the aesthetics of the nineteenth century. From this friendship, sealed at Le Bœuf sur le Toit, between the young composers Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc and Germaine Tailleferre, came emblematic works such as Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (The Wedding Party on the Eiffel Tower), a modern farce weaving together dance, pantomime, drama, satire and fairy-tale enchantment, with the musical score intermingled with spoken word.

In 1930, Cocteau inspired the original music Georges Auric composed for his first film, The Blood of a Poet. Orpheus and Beauty and the Beast would follow, their scores still echoing today.

Avant-garde to the extreme and a discoverer of genius, Cocteau was soon dazzled by jazz, which he saw as the chamber music of the twentieth century, a way of writing that was, in his eyes, the poet's own. Later he would write songs for Marianne Oswald, befriend Trenet, Bécaud and Aznavour, and of course Édith Piaf, for whom he wrote Le Bel Indifférent.

Curated by: GIP Maison Jean Cocteau, Muriel Genthon.
Scenography: Frédéric Beauclair.

Ever in pursuit of the modern, Jean Cocteau created the ballet Parade in 1916, commissioned by Serge de Diaghilev, the impresario of the Ballets Russes in early twentieth-century Paris. Diaghilev, eager to keep pace with the avant-garde, had thrown down a challenge: "Étonne-moi!", "Astonish me!" Cocteau rose to it. At twenty-eight, barely back from the front lines of the Great War, he dreamed up a total spectacle, one that wove together dance, painting, sculpture and mime. Like Le Potomak, the ballet marked a break with the poetry he had written before 1914. Steeped in the world of the music hall, it takes the form of a parade staged before the backdrop of a fairground theatre: a conjurer, a pair of acrobats and a little American girl perform feats to lure the crowd inside, each one advertising their own act. That is the parade, and that is Parade!

Cocteau's genius lay in drawing creative spirits together, becoming the alchemist of very different imaginations: Pablo Picasso for the costumes and sets, Erik Satie for the music, Léonide Massine for the choreography. Collective work was the watchword of this experimental piece of dance and music, and it gave rise to a true "poet's ballet." The first performance, at the Théâtre du Châtelet on 18 May 1917, ended in failure. Three years later the work was revived, and this time it was embraced. It came to be seen as the matrix of the avant-garde ballets of the 1920s. For the first time, everyday reality was danced and modern life took the stage.

Curator: GIP Maison Jean Cocteau, Muriel Genthon.
Scenography: Frédéric Beauclair.

Deeply inspired by mythology, Jean Cocteau began transcribing the great classical myths, where man and beast become one, as early as the 1920s. His house in Milly-la-Forêt gave him the setting in which to fully compose a universe that echoes his work. He turned to his friend, the decorator Madeleine Castaing, famed for her eclectic taste, to set the stage for a home he arranged over time. Guided by chance discoveries and sudden passions, the poet shaped his house into a theatrical stage set. Sphinxes, a mermaid, a carousel horse mark out the rooms with their presence, answering tapestries adorned with scrolls or leopard-print imitations, horned furniture, and chairs standing on animal feet.

The poet's fascination with these picturesque animal figures has its roots in a cherished childhood, set to the rhythm of fairy tales, where cats wear boots and spells turn humans into animals and back again. That childhood also brought archaeological pieces inherited from his maternal grandfather, Eugène Lecomte, which stirred Cocteau's imagination, carrying him off to a world outside time. Steeped in classical culture and in the emotions of childhood, the poet made the timeless power of the great myths his own throughout his life: myths in which the animal mirrors human passions, a chimerical double. The temporary exhibition "Jean Cocteau's Enchanted Bestiary" brings to light the animals that inhabit the house. It is a plunge into a world that recalls the spirit of his masterpiece Beauty and the Beast, where visitors meet creatures that evoke the poet's passions and tastes.

Curated by: GIP Maison Jean Cocteau, Muriel Genthon.
Scenography: Frédéric Beauclair.