DP MJCCSW 4.10_EN - copie - Maison de la France

II. The museum’s collections
Gift of 1,800 works
Severin Wunderman’s donation consists of 1,800 works, including 990 works by Cocteau,
offering a very comprehensive perspective on the artist’s career. All of its periods are
represented, from the first self-­‐portraits of the 1910s up to the “Mediterranean” period towards
the end of his life, little known to the general public.
The collection thus consists of drawings, prints, paintings, ceramics, tapestries, jewellery, books
and manuscripts, but also 172 photographs relating to Cocteau (photographers represented
include Germaine Krull, Berenice Abbott, Irving Penn, Philippe Halsman, Boris Lipnitzky, Serge
Lido, Sacha Masour and Lucien Clergue), 278 works by Cocteau’s fellow artists (Picasso,
Modigliani, Foujita, Di Chirico, among others) as well as an exceptional grouping of 360 works
related to Sarah Bernhardt, in honour of whom Cocteau coined the expression “monstre sacré”
(sacred monster).
Apart from masterpieces representing the multiple facets of Jean Cocteau’s genius, the
collection also sheds light on the man himself, thanks to a large number of portraits and tributes
by his fellow artists.
Together with the pre-­‐existing collection of the museum at the Bastion, the new Musée Jean
Cocteau thus houses more than 2,000 works, including 1,190 by Cocteau himself, and
constitutes the largest publicly accessible collection in the world of works by the artist.
A museum itinerary tracing the life of Jean Cocteau
The museum’s permanent collection display, consisting of 250 works,
leads visitors along a meandering journey through space and time,
punctuated by glimpses of the personalities and milestones having had a
major influence on Cocteau’s life and work.
The rotating display of the permanent collection is organised in the form
of seven sequences offering a chronological exploration of Cocteau’s life
(1889–1963) structured around sets of major works.
These sets are themselves connected to specific themes, reflecting the
successive transformations in Cocteau’s career and encouraging visitors
to dispense with the chronological order of the presentation in line
with their specific interests:
1/ Miniature Theatre of the Imagination
Through a dialogue between documents of the period and works of
fiction, this first sequence highlights Cocteau’s youth and the
environment in which he was raised, the background that forged his
aesthetic outlook. The onset of the “mal rouge et or”, an affliction
Germaine Krull
Portrait of Cocteau
1929
Inv. No. 2005.1.1008
Black-­‐and-­‐white photograph
musée Jean Cocteau collection Séverin
Wunderman
© Germaine Krull, Museum Folkwang, Essen
brought on by red and gold, thus a passion for the magic of theatre, which would remain with
Cocteau his entire life, is traced here to two mythic personalities: Sarah Bernhardt and Vaslav
Nijinsky.
2/ The Imposter
The Imposter, a sequence marked by the experience of the First World War, illustrates the
emergence of fruitful interconnections between autobiography and mythography at this
moment in Cocteau’s career. A number of major works, including Le Potomak and Thomas
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