This article by journalist Jean-Marc Louis, published in the weekly La Semaine on 16 March 2023, presents my book My Friend Jean, published by Éditions Jalon.
The stained glass of Saint-Maximin Church in Metz is the outcome not only of artistic technique and spiritual intention, but also of the powerful bond that united Jean Cocteau and the young Lorraine-born Édouard Dermit for many years. My Friend Jean tells that story.
Nothing seemed to destine Dermit, a miner from Bouligny, to meet the celebrated poet and polymath. Yet Dermit loved the arts. He often travelled from the Meuse to Metz, frequented its cultural venues and began to draw and paint, fascinated above all by Van Gogh.
One day in 1947, he went to Paris to see an exhibition at the Paul Morihien bookshop-gallery in the Palais-Royal. While he was speaking to the bookseller, Jean Marais and Jean Cocteau arrived. Introductions were made; the miner and the poet immediately took to one another. Cocteau invited Dermit to work with him, and Dermit moved to Milly-la-Forêt.
He entered a wholly unfamiliar world of luxury, cinema and famous artists, even appearing in Cocteau’s theatrical and film productions. The two men became lovers.
The fate of the Saint-Maximin windows was sealed at Picasso’s villa, La Californie. Dermit and Cocteau were Picasso’s guests at the same time as Jean Dedieu, an assistant to Metz’s chief architect of historic monuments. Dedieu had come to discuss the possibility of Picasso designing windows for Metz Cathedral. Picasso hesitated; Cocteau joined the conversation and declared his interest.
Cocteau produced sketches based on the four Evangelists. Unaccustomed to administrative obstacles and stung by criticism from church and heritage officials, who reproached the “Assyrian stiffness” of his figures, he abandoned the cathedral project.
A resolutely modern work
This setback did not end Cocteau’s desire to create a work in Metz. Dermit understood the deeper reason only later: Cocteau wished to embody his love for him in a work of art, just as he had done for others he loved.
The cathedral controversy reached André Malraux, then Minister of Culture. A state commission was subsequently given to Cocteau for the windows of Saint-Maximin Church. In 1962 he began a resolutely modern ensemble drawing on ancient myth, Nietzschean philosophy, psychoanalysis and esotericism.
Cocteau sought to bring modernity into stained glass and to open another path towards the sacred, beyond Christian and Catholic tradition alone. The result was an artistic testament whose completion, after his death, depended on Édouard Dermit’s fidelity and Jean Dedieu’s work.
That same issue of La Semaine also featured my book As in a Dream: Jean Cocteau in Metz in 1962.