HONG KONG — I fell in love with Jean Cocteau when I was 19. I spent nights taking photographs of his epic 1930 film The Blood of a Poet frame by frame. The infatuation was similar to one I had with Picasso, whose paintings I copied obsessively, determined to learn the language of the man who made “Guernica.” In both cases, my heart was eventually broken. First, I learned Picasso used women like he used his paintbrushes. Then it transpired that Cocteau was a Nazi sympathizer. It was hard to know where I stood with both artists afterwards.
Jean Cocteau
Posted inOpinion
Watch Jean Cocteau’s Nightmarish First Feature Film
Inveterate surrealist and playwright, artist, and writer polymath Jean Cocteau said that his first film, The Blood of a Poet (1929), wasn’t a work of surrealism — he wanted to “avoid the deliberate manifestations of the unconscious.” But, I have to say, it’s pretty surreal.
Posted inArt
The Impossible Curation of Schiaparelli and Prada
It’s inevitable not to compare the new show at the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute to last year’s blockbuster, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, however unfair that might be. But it doesn’t matter, because Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations, a pairing of two disparate designers that gives far too much precedence to the latter, falls flat, regardless of what preceded it.
