ART / CATHY CURTIS : Jean Cocteau Centenary Festival : Jean Cocteau Collection at UC Irvine Reveals a Lively but Distinctly Minor Talent

“Fame is the consequence of a misunderstanding. It is like the crowd which gathers around the scene of an accident.... A few people stop and wonder what is happening. Others imitate them, question them. Then comes the crowd, which no longer sees anything.... Since everyone invents the accident, no one knows what has happened. Gradually the accident is distorted....”

The 62-year-old Jean Cocteau made this observation in his diary on Feb. 3, 1952, when he was (as usual) feeling persecuted by his critics. Poet, playwright, ballet librettist and stage designer, film maker, novelist, essayist, poster and stained-glass designer, illustrator, painter--Cocteau was an aesthetic honeybee, buzzing between each of the arts to create a rarefied nectar of his own.

A look at his visual art--a portion of which is on view at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery (through Sunday) in a Cocteau Centenary show drawn from the collection of Irvine’s Severin Wunderman Museum--reveals a lively but distinctly minor talent. Despite the mighty trumpetings of the Wunderman Museum, any cult fame that may cling to Cocteau purely on account of his art is indeed “the consequence of a misunderstanding.”

It seems perfectly in character that by far his best works were the caricatures he dashed off as a young man. Cocteau’s witty sensibility was equipped with a radar for seeking out gifted kindred spirits, and his drawings reflect the circles in which he traveled. But, as is so often true of such highly refined sensibilities, he blossomed early and became impotently repetitious and derivative with age.

One of the earliest (1909) of his quickie portraits in the exhibit is of Sarah Bernhardt at 65. The 20-year-old Cocteau--who would always prefer profile views--mercilessly notes the famous actress’s double chin as well as her famous pompadour of frizzed hair and the rings on each of her fingers.

Cocteau drew the violinist and composer Niccolo Paganini as an attenuated skeleton; the French composer Georges Auric, with a huge chin, wearing a bowler hat and toting an umbrella like an Englishman; the painter and stage designer Leon Bakst as a big-beaked bird wearing eyeglasses.

In one sketch, the imposing bulk of Ballets Russes impresario Serge Diaghilev dwarfs dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, devastatingly caricatured as a puppet by means of three well-placed vertical lines.

A few quick lines give us pianist Artur Rubinstein’s self-satisfied smirk, proud nose and puffed-out chest. A more elaborate drawing shows composer Igor Stravinsky with a zombie-like mask-face, his long fingers tensely holding his place in a book. Cocteau’s notes on the paper explain that he is visiting the house of Coco Chanel (the couturiere) and she is singing badly in the next room.

There are a few other works of interest.

One is the poster Cocteau designed for the 1911 Ballets Russes production of “Le Spectre de la Rose,” with the strong image of ballerina Tamara Karsavina’s full skirt billowing backward. Another is the intriguingly conceptual drawing, “Le Sens du Futur” (the direction of the future) from 1929, which--with its image of an antique sculpture bust holding a pair of disembodied legs--suggests the sense of despair that haunted Cocteau in the year his opium addiction bottomed out and Diaghilev died, dissolving the Ballets Russes.

Cocteau’s imaginative resources also lent themselves to the design of a tapestry (realized in infinitesimal detail by a French atelier in 1948). The subject is Judith carrying the head of Holophernes, a biblical theme that takes on something of the hallucinatory quality of Cocteau’s films.

As he wrote about the scene in his diary, “Like a Jewish ghost (Judith) passes through the groups of guards, who are sleeping in the moonlight. On the upper right her servant, like some sort of insect, casts a last glance into the room where the beheading took place.”

But despite his complex work for stage and film based on the myths and literature of ancient Greece, his efforts at creating Neoclassical motifs in paint and pastel from the 1950s tend to come across as facile, repetitive doodles of pretty boys, derivative of Picasso’s mythological lithographs but lacking their sting and panache.

“Visage Grec Ancien” (face of an ancient Greek) is little more than a large-scale version of Cocteau’s standard idealized male facial type, done in oil paint on canvas instead of pen on paper. In “Femme Endormie” (sleeping woman), blocks of color create the contours of a face--a tired, watered-down interpretation of Cubist and Fauve techniques already decades old. The two versions of “The Lovers”--big, schematic heads absorbed in the activity of French-kissing--are simply embarrassing.

Cocteau leans heavily on Picasso in “Madame Favini and her Daughter,” a caricature in paint based on the bored women and fractious children Cocteau encountered in the drawing rooms of the wealthy. Outfitted in a huge-collared dress decorated with little doodles (decoratively gouged out of the paint), the lady reclines dreamily while her offspring amuses herself with a Flit insect exterminator. A humdrum seascape hanging on the wall satirizes the fictional Mme. Favini’s aesthetic taste.

Granted the charm of his small-scale work, Cocteau seems to have lacked the creative independence--as well as the technical gifts--necessary to create major works of art. His more ambitious attempts are overly precious and superficial, like intimate jokes never meant to extend beyond his circle of intimates.

The Severin Wunderman Museum, which is dedicated to Cocteau’s work, takes its name from the chairman of the board of Severin Montres Ltd., a manufacturer and distributor of Gucci watches in whose offices the museum is located. In fact, Wunderman has seen fit to reproduce (as promotional materials describe it) “Cocteau’s legendary Orpheus”--a profile of the Greek god and a minimal sketch of his lyre--on the faces of a line of pricey watches and clocks.

But then again, perhaps that’s the way Cocteau’s supreme style-consciousness is best marketed to the style-conscious ‘80s: as something expensive, vaguely “cultural” and just begging for the kind of mindless gushing to which the social-column set are prone.

Work by Cocteau from the Severin Wunderman Museum will be shown at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery through Feb. 19 in conjunction with the Jean Cocteau Centenary Festival. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free. Information: (714) 856-6610.