Jean Cocteau’s Stained Glass in Metz: His Final Masterpiece

An artist of metamorphosis, light, osmosis, movement and rhythm, Jean Cocteau designed stained glass of exceptional quality for Saint-Maximin Church in Metz during the final two years of his life, 1962–1963. Fourteen bays comprising twenty-four windows are infused with rare poetic intensity and reveal an astonishingly prophetic artistic vision.

Christian Schmitt’s 2012 book, I Trace the Invisible, published by Éditions des Paraiges, brought timely attention to this jewel of contemporary art. It presents a masterpiece almost unknown to the public and honours the most accomplished, original and audacious stained-glass work created in Metz by the brilliant polymath Jean Cocteau.

This small parish church surpasses every church Cocteau had previously decorated. It became a chosen setting in which he could experiment with developments in contemporary art. In his most dazzling inventions, he reconciled the oldest and most distant cultures through the art of his own time. His work reflects the originality of modern art in the twentieth century: its desire to approach works produced on other continents, by different cultures and imaginations.

Cocteau’s friendship with Picasso encouraged his interest in ancestral and imaginary art. Through the strangeness of the associations they awaken in memory, the forms in these windows evoke the mystery of ritual ceremonies that are not necessarily Christian.

The central window of the apse

The colour of the central window gives it immense visual force: a dominant blue bursts out among shades of ochre and orange. Cocteau used this blue ground throughout the ensemble because it best exalts infinity, dream and the passage into imagination.

The forms are geometric, while lines traverse the glass and create extraordinary rhythmic relationships. More surprising is the figure itself. In the lowest section appears a man with raised arms. The motif is neither insignificant nor commonplace but refers to a theme of universal scope.

Humanity possesses two fundamental drives: the first towards knowledge, the second towards immortality, often expressed by the man with raised arms. This universal image crosses ages, latitudes, myths and religions. Cocteau must have thought constantly about it while creating his most important work before his death.

Throughout his life he used mythology, and Orpheus in particular, to restore loved ones to life and make them immortal through artistic creation.

The other apse windows

The central window and its raised figure symbolise the elevation of the axis mundi, the centre of the world. Through the message of immortality carried by this cosmic axis, the other apse windows become easier to understand.

Like a repeated signal, the central theme triggers a magnificent return to the beginning of the world. The four neighbouring windows, arranged in pairs, symbolically renew the original beginnings. To make immortality possible is always to travel back towards the origin of the great Whole and the beginning of Time.

The chaos preceding creation appears through the egg, the embryo and the phases of the moon. Exuberant vegetation fills the second window on the right, suggesting a new birth of the natural world.

Cocteau, painter of transcendence?

“I am not the person you think I am,” Cocteau said, dismantling his public image as an acrobat on a wire. Might these windows contain something deeper that has escaped us?

This was not another brief personal conversion of the kind associated with his friendship with Jacques Maritain. Rather, it may have been a meeting imposed upon him by the medium itself. Marcel Gauchet’s work on the dynamics of transcendence helps support this hypothesis. According to Gauchet, religious division initially lay between the human order and its foundation; it later shifted between human beings and may now be moving into the heart of the individual.

Cocteau seems to have experienced this emergence of the sacred through an inner crossing. In poetry, cinema and his other arts he continually tested or crossed the limits of the ineffable. Stained glass offered another passage, a form of illuminating access. The transparent medium symbolically opened a door onto the Wholly Other. Working with coloured glass inside a church mobilised another self within him. Perhaps this caused an intimate rupture — a fracture within being itself.