Published by Thierry Fedrigo in Le Républicain Lorrain, 22 August 2019.

Christian Schmitt is an unexpected figure. A former public-finance inspector from Metz with a passion for street art, he has devoted himself to Jean Cocteau’s secular imagery and has now made a film about it, available on YouTube.

In the fifteen-minute documentary Jean Cocteau: I Trace the Invisible, the art historian and author of several books, articles and exhibition catalogues interprets the stained glass of Saint-Maximin Church, an ensemble constructed around the theme of immortality.

It is a prophetic work. Cocteau, an “Immortal” of the Académie française and an internationally celebrated poet, worked on it only from early 1962 until 1963, the year of his death at the age of seventy-four.

Metz can therefore take pride in possessing Cocteau’s last major work, listed by Atlas Obscura among the places in the world to see before one dies.

“1962 was a very important moment for Metz and Jean Cocteau,” Christian Schmitt explains. “That year he did two fundamental things for the city: he designed the sets and costumes for Pelléas and Mélisande, Maeterlinck’s drama set to music by Debussy, and he began the stained glass at Saint-Maximin.”

After the affront of his rejection at Saint Stephen’s Cathedral, Cocteau was free at Saint-Maximin and enjoyed Malraux’s support. What had initially seemed a setback ultimately became a fortunate decision.

Close to Jean Dedieu, the architect who brought the windows to completion, Christian Schmitt was entrusted with one of the full-scale cartoons on which Cocteau had worked. Measuring 2.8 metres high, it was intended for a future exhibition at the Musée de la Cour d’Or, alongside Schmitt’s second book on the Saint-Maximin windows, which he calls “a powerful hymn to immortality”.

Above all, he stresses, the windows contain no conventional Christian motif or biblical symbolism, something unique for a church. Cocteau called himself a true Christian but a poor Catholic. He was completely free. His windows refer to Greek mythology, ancient art, alchemy, Kabbalah and esotericism: sources apparently foreign to a Christian church.

This may explain why, half a century later, Cocteau’s work in Metz remained so little discussed. It is never too late to recover lost time and appreciate an exceptional pictorial ensemble that deserves better than indifference.

Saint-Maximin Church, 61 rue Mazelle, Metz.