Article by Anne Rimlinger-Pignon, published in Le Républicain Lorrain on 10 August 2016.
Christian Schmitt first learned to write through art. He then ventured into theatre to pay tribute to Cocteau’s stained glass. “The production The Man with Raised Arms seeks to bring to life the story Jean Cocteau imagined through the windows of Saint-Maximin Church in Metz,” he explained.
His brother led him towards art: Jean-Louis Schmitt, known as Trévisse, a painter from Metz. Christian initially belonged to a very different world. “I am a tax inspector,” he would almost murmur, blushing. Yet he is the kind of person who enters a chosen field with complete enthusiasm.
Art drew him into a world of colour that he has never ceased to observe, decipher and illuminate. That is fitting for someone who became a specialist in stained glass. After clarifying the work of Roger Bissière at Metz Cathedral, he turned to Cocteau at Saint-Maximin. It was a revelation.
Cocteau should originally have created several windows for the cathedral, Schmitt explains, but was rejected because of his elusive public image and because, in the post-war climate, he was an openly homosexual artist. André Malraux finally insisted that he should create something in Metz. His arrival at Saint-Maximin proved a stroke of fortune.
For the art critic, the twenty-four windows form Cocteau’s final masterpiece. “Cocteau was a brilliant polymath, and I particularly appreciate his modernism. The man with raised arms refers to mythology; all the windows speak of immortality.”
Schmitt devoted a book to the ensemble because Metz’s heritage had to be revealed. Encouraged by his actor friend Théophile Choquet, he went further and wrote a play. He was captivated by the pleasure of writing. “The words escape from my fingers as I write. It is an exercise that strikes me and goes beyond me.”
After stained glass, he returned to another early passion: street art. He rediscovered within it a tribal and archaic form of art. The street artists he met seemed to recover the forms of the arts of the first peoples. His texts then narrated the artists’ limitless imagination.
Christian Schmitt writes for pleasure and for the act of looking. Might he one day write a novel? “A historical one, then, about my family descended from master glassmakers of the sixteenth century.” There is no such thing as chance.