To this day, Jean Cocteau is still burdened with a reputation as a dilettante. In reality, he leaves no one indifferent: he unsettles as much as he disconcerts. He has often been reproached for venturing into every genre and risking the appearance of a jack-of-all-trades: poetry, verse prose, novels, drawing, painting, sculpture, choreography, theatre, cinema and, finally, stained glass. Yet each time he surprises us by revealing himself to be an exceptional artist.
His final passion, stained glass, and the work he created in Metz are no exception. Across the twenty-four windows of the small parish church of Saint-Maximin, he distilled a highly original art, transformed by mythology, the arts of the first peoples and occult traditions such as alchemy and Kabbalah. More surprisingly still, through this new medium he explored some of the most advanced developments in painting. In the three-light window of the church’s north transept, he succeeded in synthesising two Surrealist elements: the totem and biomorphism.
Wilfredo Lam’s jungle
In the three lancets of this bay, the poet leads us into a distinctive world, very close to the “jungle” of the Surrealist painter Wifredo Lam.
“The tangled jungle becomes animal, or else the human being changes into a tree animated by multiple eyes; mythical and living things send out shoots from which other horned heads spring like buds…” — Marcel Jean, History of Surrealist Painting, Seuil, 1959, p. 303.
Its African foundations are powerfully asserted through the decorative motifs and the very elongated mask in the central lancet, built like a totem and furnished with bulging eyes. We naturally think of the Cubists, and Picasso in particular, who made extensive use of African masks. In this stained-glass composition, however, these are more specifically totemic figures, close to those employed by André Masson, Joan Miró and other Surrealists who delighted in strange and fabulous beings inhabiting the disturbed and disturbing layers of the psyche.
For these artists, the totem expressed an authentic primitivism. It embodied powerful forces revealed through a hybrid presence of animated forms and signs that were often geometric or schematic. The evocative power of totemism can also be sensed in the work of American artists such as Clyfford Still and, more generally, among the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s. The primary figures and symbols of so-called primitive art function as signs of hidden and complex realities.
Myth according to Freud and Jung
This brings us to myth, a central concern for all these artists. Freud and then Jung stressed that myth structured the deepest levels of experience and could thus express a universal language. Cocteau’s principal aim was to reveal the reality of the afterlife and of another life, and he pursued it through the extraordinary power of myth.
Barnett Newman wrote of the Indigenous artist of the north-west coast of the United States, in a text entitled “The Ideographic Picture”, that a form was a living thing: a vehicle for complex, abstract thought and a vessel for terror before the unknowable. In works such as The Command (1946) and The Death of Euclid (1947), Newman therefore constructed vertical conduits endowed with a silent aura, standing out against a dark and chaotic ground.
We are very close here to the elongated figure in Cocteau’s window, which possesses the same totemic power. Through its verticality, the totem links the familiar with the unknown, earthly with celestial powers, the immediate with the timeless, and the ephemeral with the eternal. Cocteau did not stop there: he intensified this evocative process by adding biomorphism.
Evoking another life through biomorphism
By combining totem and biomorphism, Cocteau reinforced the coding of the figure and gave it a more provocative syntax. The totem already asserts an authentic primitivism and its powerful forces. The eyes within the mask add a palpable unease. Nor are they confined to this spot: other eyes emerge elsewhere, for example at the tip of a shrub’s trunk in the three-light window on the east side.
All these eyes challenge us. Has life already appeared in another form? Are we already looking at the afterlife? Through biomorphism, Cocteau seems to go further, as the word’s Greek roots suggest: bios, life, and morphē, form. It allows him to evoke living presences where we least expect them.
The symmetry of the totem, divided into two sections, also imparts a surprising breath through an invisible line that seems to run down the centre of the work. It heightens the antithesis between “before” and “after”: before and after death, or before and after life. Cross-sections had already been used by artists such as Still to paint matter’s most intimate folds. Pollock used them to identify sexual polarities in Male and Female.
The power of the gaze was rendered by artists such as Aaron Siskind in Gloucester 16A (1944), where incisions in the surface suggest extinguished eyes scrutinising us through the thickness of the pigment. That penetrating gaze is equally present in Cocteau’s stained glass, through the emergence of doubled eyes that never cease to fix the viewer.
As though this were not enough, biomorphism adds a poetic and suggestive touch. It also provides a transition. For Rothko, Pollock and de Kooning, it helped open the passage from figuration to abstraction. Cocteau’s purpose was different: he sought a passage from mortal life to immortality. Yet we find the same primacy of life celebrated by Rothko when he joins vegetal, animal and geometric elements. In The Syrian Bull (1943), this biomorphic repertoire perpetually immortalises life by evoking living presences.
For Cocteau more than for anyone else, such living presence becomes the sign of timelessness and eternity. We can therefore understand the full meaning of his work when he utters this prophetic and testamentary cry: “I have just killed death!”