ART : Cocteau Exhibit in Irvine: Some Minor Notes on Major Talent : Works represented are part of a personal collection. And you must understand French if you want to unravel the mystery of the artist’s jottings.

There are people who enjoy visiting the former home of Famous Artist X or Famous Poet Y--a domestic shrine where The Great One’s slippers, pen, brush and pipe are preserved in perpetuity, “just as he left them,” by devoted townspeople, an arts group, or folks hoping to make a buck.

But to me, there’s something airless and dispiriting about shrines to “genius,” whether they are houses, shacks or one-person museums. There tends not to be enough fresh air in such places, not enough dissenting points of view. Where myth reigns supreme, frankness is hard to find.

The Severin Wunderman Museum in Irvine (housed on the second floor of the offices of the Severin Group, a Swiss watch company run by Belgian-born Wunderman) is devoted to the French poet, playwright, filmmaker, librettist and sometime artist Jean Cocteau. I don’t think they have his slippers, but there is a bronze cast of The Great One’s small hands, which look like they are playing an invisible piano.

What this museum really has in spades is Wunderman’s collection--he claims it’s the biggest in the world--of drawings, prints, paintings, tapestries, theater decor, ceramics, manuscripts and films made by Cocteau. But an odd paradox is at work here.

On the one hand, Cocteau’s historical value lies not in his repetitive drawings, garish tapestries and imitative pottery but in his creative ideas for ballet, some of his writings, and his startlingly original films (“The Blood of a Poet,” “Orpheus,” “Beauty and the Beast”).

On the other hand, nobody can collect ideas or ballets, and “collecting” literature and film really means amassing first editions, typescripts or film reels. These objects are mute unless they are read or projected. Visual art--visible to the naked eye, so to speak--obviously makes for a sexier collection.

As a result, Cocteau’s “genius” is represented for viewers in this museum with some of his most minor work. Not only that, but precious little care is taken in the wall texts or supporting material to discuss the issues and style of his literary achievements.

Even Cocteau’s ubiquitous jottings are destined to remain mysteries to viewers with no knowledge of French. Inquiring about this lack, I discovered that no prepared translations are available for curious visitors. (I chose not to take a tour of the show, preferring to do my looking in private--though at this museum, visitors are constantly monitored by a member of the staff, due to attempts at larceny in past years.)

At any rate, since the two smallish rooms that constitute the public part of the museum cannot show everything at once, the staff is obliged to cook up exhibitions that showcase portions of the collection. Through July 10, the subject of the hour is “Villefranche: Pursuits of the Flesh and Mysteries of the Soul.”

The title refers to the French town of Villefranche-sur-Mer, just north of Nice and a hop-skip from Monaco. Cocteau, then in his mid-30s, fled there in anguish shortly after the death of his 21-year-old lover, Raymond Radiguet. (While the Encyclopedia Britannica and my Petit Larousse say Radiguet died in 1923, a wall text in the exhibit has him dying, “from typhoid,” in 1922. The Britannica article claims a combination of hard living and alcoholism did him in.)

The relationship between the two men, which began when Radiguet was 16, was charged with a literary as well as a physical passion. Radiguet’s precocious stylistic restraint and clarity fascinated his lover, who had been something of a prodigy himself.

Scion of a cultivated bourgeois family, Cocteau published his first volume of poems at 19. Shortly thereafter, he became part of the world of the Ballets Russes, then directed by Sergei Diaghilev, who had a knack for getting talented, later-to-be-famous people to collaborate in making ballets.

Working with the cream of the avant-garde of his day, Cocteau concocted the airy scenarios of “Parade” (music by Erik Satie, sets by Pablo Picasso) and “Le boeuf sur le toit” (music by Darius Milhaud). He wrote an opera libretto based on Sophocles’ play, “Antigone” (music by Arthur Honneger). He fell in with the ragtag Montparnasse crowd who were inventing modernism--among them, Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and poets Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire. Jacob introduced Cocteau to Radiguet.

In a series of drawings of his lover taking a nap, Cocteau lingers obsessively on linear details--the thick, curving lips, and the individual hairs of his lashes and eyebrows--but seems to have had so much trouble with the boy’s balled-up fist that he didn’t bother to finish it.

As a visual artist, Cocteau’s talents were minor. He could do witty caricatures, but his stylized drawings were extremely mannered and repetitive. His stylized treatments often seem to have been inspired by his own artistic limitations rather than the distinctive features of his subjects.

A painting of Jacqueline Picasso from 1954, the year after she and Picasso separated, shows her as a Ms. Potato Head, with a scrawny neck and a very long nose attached, Cocteau-style, to her eyebrows. God only knows what this painting is doing in this exhibit, however. The installation as a whole is annoyingly casual about chronology and context.

In 1924 Villefranche-sur-Mer was a rowdy port just beginning to be discovered by the artistic crowd. Swank photographs by George Platt Lynes in the exhibit show rakish Monroe Wheeler and toothy Glenway Wescott, both writers. An untranslated letter from Cocteau to Wescott thanks the author for some unspecified advice.

Cocteau’s images of the local sailor populace suggest that they apparently never went out in public without a cigarette rakishly stuck behind one ear. Alas, the exhibit offers no information about the spiky-haired, sloe-eyed Marcel Khil, or the other arty subjects of Cocteau’s drawings, who also include Francine Weiseweiler, Jean Hugo, Jean-Pierre Aumont and Jean Desbordes.

“Misia,” to which Cocteau addressed a letter about artistic matters (and included a drawing of Radiguet’s face which, for some reason, makes him look like the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky), is nowhere identified as the famous art patron, Misia Sert.

Despite all these erstwhile pals, while he was holed up in the Hotel Welcome, Cocteau wailed that “all my friends are dead.” This sentiment and others equally redolent of self-dramatizing gloom (“Life is the first part of death,” “Now I’m alone, stupefied with sadness”) are inscribed on a series of self-portraits in which he experiments with various arty ways to make himself look zonked or ill-fated. In one drawing, rays shoot out from his eyes; in another, he holds a thorny rose stem in his mouth.

The works on view are mechanically reproduced versions of the drawings, taken from Cocteau’s 1925 collection of self-portraits, “Le Mystere de Jean l’Oiseleur” (“The Mystery of Jean the Birdman,” one of his nicknames).

Cocteau became an opium addict during these years, a condition involving numerous “cures” and numerous relapses. Drawings Cocteau made under the influence bristle with multiple objects that look like rolled-up diplomas but are presumably hand-rolled cigarettes. One of these mildly bizarre sketches depicts a room outfitted with ladders, a mysterious staircase, bundles of smoking cigarettes and a pathetic bunch of folks. One figure is attached to the ceiling and the others are either reduced to skeleton status or deformed in some manner.

Other Cocteau scribbles of the era include “Surrealist Drawing”--a medley of large and small fingers whose positions suggest groupings of spread limbs and penises--and an image of paralysis in which a big human head stuffed with cigarettes sits on a bird perch next to a parrot.

Even his classically influenced drawings of the period evoke a Surrealistic sense of physical dislocation. In “Opium: the Direction of the Future,” the torso of a Roman statue floats above its pedestal; its hands grip two disembodied, truncated legs.

In 1930 (the year his first film, “The Blood of a Poet,” was released), Cocteau finally kicked his habit. Jacques Maritain--the theologian who befriended many artists and poets and was a believer in the redemptive power of the arts--visited Cocteau in his sanatorium, prompting a flurry of Catholic guilt.

When he returned to Villefranche-sur-Mer as an elderly man in the mid-1950s, it was to restore and decorate a church, the Chapelle St.-Pierre, which ironically happened to be directly across the street from the hotel where Cocteau used to spend his days in an opium stupor. Actually, when you look at the studies for the chapel frescoes, it’s hard not to believe he picked up a pipe again, for old time’s sake.

One study shows convoys of rangy, ragged-wing angels flying about. Another is a melodramatic scene in which St. Peter seems to be directing traffic for a winged nude clinging to an empty floating garment.

It is hardly surprising to see that the profiled head of Christ crowned with thorns that Cocteau painted around the same time for the church of St. Blaise-des-Simples in Milly-la-Foret is his own angular visage. You could say that he identified, as an artist, with Christ’s suffering. Or you could say that he had a hard time allowing anything get in the way of his ego.

Cocteau himself wrote on one of his Birdman drawings, “A little too much is just enough for me.” Especially in view of his own adoration of excess and lifelong clamor for adoration, any serious exhibit of his work requires at least some discussion of the intellectual content of his literary works and his broader cultural context--as well as an acknowledgment of his deficiencies and limitations. At the Severin Wunderman Museum, the hothouse atmosphere of idolatry offers nothing of the kind.