Jean Cocteau @ Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice – "Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge" – Exhibition Curated by Kenneth E. Silver

Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge 

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 

Organized by Kenneth E. Silver  

April 13 – September 16, 2024

Philippe Halsman: Jean Cocteau, New York, USA. 1949

© Philippe Halsman / Magnum Photos

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection presents Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge, the largest retrospective ever organized in Italy dedicated to Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), the enfant terrible of the French twentieth-century art scene.

Organized by eminent Cocteau specialist and New York University art historian Kenneth E. Silver, the exhibition highlights the artist’s versatility, the multiple juggling acts that distinguished his production, which often drew criticism from his contemporaries. Loans from prestigious institutions, such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, and the Musée Jean Cocteau, Collection Séverin Wunderman in Menton, as well as major private collections, including the Cartier Collection, gather over one hundred and fifty works in an impressive variety of media. These include drawings, graphics, jewelry, tapestries, historical documents, books, magazines, photographs, documentaries, and films directed by Cocteau, which trace the development of this multifaced artist’s unique and highly personal aesthetics, alongside the highlights of his tumultuous career.

Among the most influential figures of the twentieth century, Jean Cocteau was impressively prolific. He referred to himself as a poet, but he was also a novelist, playwright, and critic whose subjects ranged from art and music to other expository forms such as travel writing and memoirs. At the same time, he was also a gifted, highly original, and innovative visual artist. This side of the artist’s creative life is focus of the exhibition organized by the Peggy Guggenheim Collection: Cocteau the draftsman, graphic artist, muralist, fashion-jewelry-and-textile designer, and filmmaker. For his eclectic nature, he could easily be described as a modern-age “Renaissance man,” whose extraordinary versatility left an indelible mark on twentieth-century art. A key figure of the French art scene of his time, his circle included such artists as Josephine Baker, Coco Chanel, Sergei Diaghilev, Edith Piaf, Pablo Picasso, and Tristan Tzara. However, the frank assertion of his homosexuality and the opium addiction he never attempted to conceal, meant he occupied a precarious position within the avant-garde. A man of the French establishment yet subversive of it, Cocteau embodied the cultural, social, and political contradictions of his age. 

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is an especially appropriate place to host the most comprehensive exhibition ever dedicated to Jean Cocteau in Italy, not least because of his long-lasting friendship with the U.S. patron. In fact, it was with an exhibition of Cocteau’s drawings, at the suggestion of Marcel Duchamp, that Peggy Guggenheim began her career in the art world at her London gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, in 1938. The show displayed numerous costume designs for characters the artist had created for his play, The Knights of the Round Table (1937), as well as two large-scale drawings on lined bed sheets created specifically for the exhibition. As Guggenheim recounted in her autobiography, Out of This Century (1979): “One was an allegorical subject called La peur donnant ailes au Courage, which included a portrait of the actor Jean Marais. He and two decadent looking figures appeared with pubic hairs.” The work’s daring subject matter caused a scandal with British customs, and it was only after strenuous negotiations that Guggenheim accepted the compromise of exhibiting the work privately in her office rather than in the exhibition gallery. Cocteau never offered an interpretation of this remarkable drawing, which may have been created in support of the antifascist republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. The work remained in Guggenheim’s collection and travelled with her to Venice, before being sold to a distant American relative who in turn donated it to the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona. Outside of Italy for the last seventy years, the drawing returns to Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice as a key work reflecting the triadic relationship between Guggenheim, Duchamp, and Cocteau. What is more, Jean Cocteau had a special relationship with Venice, which he first fell in love with and felt transformed by at the age of fifteen. In the years following World War II, he regularly visited the city, attending the Venice Film Festival, creating fanciful renditions of gondoliers, objects at Egidio Costantini’s glassworks in Murano—which he helped revive and personally renamed La Fucina degli Angeli (“The Foundry of the Angels”)—and paying visits to Palazzo Venier dei Leoni. The exhibition also includes a drawing from one of Peggy Guggenheim’s guestbooks, including a letter and a caricature dedicated to her.

The exhibition explores the main themes of Jean Cocteau’s oeuvre: Orpheus and poetry, eros, classicism in art, Venice and his relationship with Peggy Guggenheim, cinema, and his interest in design, expressed in fashion and especially in jewelry and the applied arts. A surprising selection of drawings also highlights the central role of desire in Cocteau’s practice, as well as his ambivalent relationship with Cubism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. A further section also explores his relationship with the world of popular culture, advertising, and film, pointing toward his influence on later artists, including Andy Warhol, Félix Gonzáles-Torres and Pedro Almodóvar. Finally, the exhibition offers a unique opportunity to admire the Academician Sword for Jean Cocteau (1955) designed by the artist and rendered by Cartier in gold, silver, emerald, ruby, diamond, ivory (originally), onyx, and enamel. This exquisitely refined object features a profile of Orpheus, a central figure to Cocteau’s artistic identity for decades, a lyre, and a star, which are recurring symbols in his work. The sword was first unveiled on October 20, 1955, when the artist was elected as a member of the Académie Française.

“Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge provides an ideal opportunity to revisit the art of Cocteau, and to see him with a fresh 21st-century point of view. His astonishing artistic range--for which, in his lifetime, he was often criticized for spreading himself too thin—now looks prescient, a model for the kind of wideranging cultural fluidity we now expect of contemporary artists. All this, in addition to his more-or-less forthright homosexuality, as well as his very public struggles with drug addiction, make him look especially modern. Perhaps the world has finally caught up with Jean Cocteau.”, says the curator Kenneth E. Silver.

Jean Cocteau. The Juggler’s Revenge

Edited by Marsilio Arte, 2024

176 pages, ENG - ISBN 9791254631683

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive illustrated catalogue, edited by Marsilio Arte, with essays by curator Kenneth E. Silver and Blake Oetting.

PEGGY GUGGENHEIM COLLECTION, VENICE

The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Palazzo Venier dei Leoni - Dorsoduro 701 - 30123 Venezia

www.guggenheim-venice.it

An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine at The Jewish Museum, New York

An Expressionist in Paris: 

The Paintings of Chaim Soutine

Jewish Museum, New York

April 26 - August 16, 1998

The Jewish Museum presents a major exhibition of works by the great French painter CHAIM SOUTINE (1893-1943). The exhibition is the first New York museum re-examination of Soutine's paintings in nearly 50 years, the last being the Museum of Modern Art's retrospective in 1950. An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine includes 56 of the finest and most important works created by the artist known for his highly expressive, gestural and thickly painted canvases. Focusing on the period between Soutine's arrival in Paris in 1913 and his death there during World War II, the show and its accompanying catalogue introduce fresh insights and new research about the artist, his style, his career, and his critical reception. Chaim Soutine raised to a new level of intensity the oil medium's mutability, elasticity, and sculptural potential, extending the "painterly" trajectory that runs from Titian, Rembrandt, and Chardin, through Courbet and Van Gogh. The Jewish Museum's exhibition examines Soutine's place in the history of French art between the wars, and within the larger context of 20th century art, in general, offering visitors a rare opportunity to enjoy his stirring and often provocative paintings. Works are being loaned from major museums and private collections in France, Germany, Switzerland, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Israel, and the United States.

Chaim Soutine's oeuvre -- consisting primarily of landscapes, still-lifes and portraits -- falls squarely within the inter-war period. Coming to maturity in the immediate post-Cubist moment in Paris, just before the advent of Surrealism, the art of Soutine is not easily characterized. Often called Expressionist, Soutine's art has been described as nervous, distorted, raw and extravagant. However, Soutine is an Expressionist with a difference. The Lithuanian-born Jew was an Expressionist in Paris, not in the Germanic capitals usually associated with that movement. Whether he is grouped among the impoverished and sometimes intemperate peintres maudits ("painters under a curse") with Modigliani and Utrillo; alongside the French painters of brooding, thickly painted canvases like Vlaminck and Roualt; as one of the "naives," with Henri Rousseau; or in the company of the many, non-French, mostly Jewish members of the School of Paris (Ecole de Paris), including Chagall and Lipchitz, Soutine remains apart. He is the very prototype of what has recently been called a "liminal" figure, one at the edges of things, between categories and critical discourses.

Chaim Soutine's emotive, gestural paintings have also been seen as precursors to the works of such Abstract Expressionist masters as Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Like them, Soutine created a field of frenetic, energized swirls and splotches of paint. His art, like theirs, was the residue of a "process" in which the artist seemed to lose all sense of self in the ecstatic moment of creation.

The Jewish Museum exhibition examines Soutine's initial reception in Paris as a Jew and an immigrant Frenchman, a time during which his dealers and critics positioned his work as "primitive" and its creator as an untutored, foreign-born, divinely inspired genius within the context of painters such as Vincent Van Gogh and Henri Rousseau. The views of Soutine's work changed radically during the 1930s, when he was seen as a "master" -- the last great hope for traditional painting in France, sometimes pitting him against the anti-painterly avant-garde movements of Dada and Surrealism. Finally, the exhibition explores Soutine's reputation in America from the late 1930s to his death in 1943, and during the emergence of American Abstract Expressionism and concurrent European trends of the 1940s and 1950s. Paradoxically, he was simultaneously seen as a link back to the past -- to European shtetl life and the Baroque masters -- and as a "prophet," a Parisian precursor of the expressive abstraction that was taking hold in New York in the wake of World War II and the Holocaust.

Reflecting these different perceptions of the artist, the exhibition is organized in three sections. In terms of the works chosen and the design of the space, each gallery evokes the atmosphere of a different period of Soutine's critical reception - the modernist salon space of the early 1920s, when Dr. Albert Barnes, the eccentric Philadelphia collector, became Soutine's first major patron; the revived classic interiors of his more conservative French patrons Paul Guillaume and Madeleine Castaing in the late 1920s and 1930s; and finally the International Style exhibition spaces of the post-war art museum as exemplified by the Museum of Modern Art in Soutine's first major retrospective in 1950. Through these three distinct environments, the changing interpretations of the artist's work over time from "primitive" genius to "master" painter to "prophet"are explored.

The introductory section of the exhibition presents a preview of what is to come with a representative work from each gallery. The Page Boy at Maxim's, c. 1927, is the first work visitors see as they enter the exhibition. Displaying the emotionally charged brushwork and distorted image of the sitter, characteristic of Soutine's portraits, The Page Boy -- with hand outstretched -- ushers the visitor into the introductory section as he insolently demands his tip.

Some of Soutine's earliest critics saw him as a "primitive" genius. This is reflected in Still Life with Herrings, a c. 1916, which owes its somber palate and stark geometric forms to the late works of Fauves such as André Derain. The work was seen by critics as conveying the poverty of the artist's early career as well as the deprivations of his life in the shtetl of Smilovitchi. In the gallery representing Chaim Soutine as a "master painter," The Pastry Cook, c. 1927, belongs to a series of the artist's paintings depicting the uniformed, serving class, updating the tradition of representing Parisian "types" from popular imagery of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Where earlier images show anecdotal detail of the sitter's profession, Soutine focused on the individuality of his subjects and their personal assertiveness. Village Square, Céret, c. 1921-22, reflects Soutine at his most abstract and explosive, qualities examined in the third gallery of the exhibition. While certain details of the village square are discernable -- the clock tower, the houses and the mountains in the background -- they dissolve in the violent swirls of Soutine's brushwork. One can see in the slashing brushwork what Willem de Kooning found so appealing in Soutine's painting.

Evaluating Soutine's importance at mid-century, one French critic wrote, "Soutine touched the limits of figurative expressionism, and opened it toward the future." This important exhibition of paintings by Chaim Soutinel provides visitors with an expanded understanding of his works and introduce new perspectives from which Soutine's contribution to the history of painting may be appreciated.

Chaim Soutine was born in 1893 in Smilovitchi, near Minsk, in White Russia. In 1910 he enrolled at the Art Academy in Vilna; and in 1913 he moved to Paris, where he met Modigliani, Chagall, Leger, Cendras, and Laurens. During the 1920s he went to Céret, Cagnes, and Châtel-Guyon, where he produced much of his early work. Dr. Albert Barnes, the famous Philadelphia art collector, discovered Soutine's work in 1922-23, and he purchased fifty-two of the artist's paintings. During the next two decades, Soutine was supported by his influential patrons, Marcellin and Madeleine Castaing. In 1941 Soutine fled Paris, in fear of the Nazis, and spent the next years in hiding in the French countryside. He died, of perforated ulcers, in August of 1943.

An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine has been organized by Norman L. Kleeblatt, Susan and Elihu Rose Curator of Fine Arts, The Jewish Museum, and Kenneth E. Silver, Associate Professor of Fine Arts, New York University. 

Following its New York showing, An Expressionist in Paris: The Paintings of Chaim Soutine will be on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from September 17, 1998 to January 3, 1999, and at the Cincinnati Art Museum from February 14 to May 2, 1999.

A 208-page catalogue with 32 color and 120 black and white illustrations, with a foreword by Joan Rosenbaum and an introduction and major essays by curators Norman L. Kleeblatt and Kenneth E. Silver, as well as contributions by Esti Dunow, Colette Giraudon, Romy Golan, Billy Klüver and Julie Martin, Donald Kuspit, Pascal Neveux, Ellen Pratt, and Mira Goldfarb Berkowitz, accompanies the exhibition. Published by The Jewish Museum, New York, and Prestel, it is available from The Jewish Museum's Cooper Shop for $65 hardcover and $29.95 paperback. This comprehensive, groundbreaking book features unique presentations and information never before published, including a photomontage composed of rare photographs of the artist, newly discovered correspondence between Soutine and the French art historian Elie Faure, and the first radiographic analysis of the artist's work, which brings to light new evidence about Soutine's use of materials and his process of painting.

JEWISH MUSEUM

1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, Manhattan

www.thejewishmuseum.org