Menton Celebrates Jean Cocteau and His Friends: Portraits and Self-Portraits

 

Menton’s enduring relationship with Jean Cocteau takes center stage once again with a major new exhibition at the Musée Jean Cocteau – Le Bastion, on view until 8 June 2026. Set within the historic seaside fort that Cocteau himself once transformed into a museum, Jean Cocteau and His Friends: Portraits and Self-Portraits offers a deeply personal lens into the life and imagination of one of France’s most singular artistic voices.

The exhibition brings together over 150 works, largely drawn from the prestigious Séverin Wunderman collection, complemented by important international loans. Together, they trace Cocteau’s creative orbit across drawing, painting, and mixed media, revealing an artist for whom boundaries between disciplines — and between people — were perpetually fluid.

Rather than following a linear timeline, the exhibition unfolds through a series of thematic chapters that reflect Cocteau’s inner life and the relationships that shaped his work. It opens with an exploration of self-portraiture, where Cocteau repeatedly returns to his own image as a site of reflection, vulnerability, and reinvention. These works oscillate between intimacy and theatricality, mirroring the emotional extremes that marked both his personal life and artistic output.

Another key section, Monstres sacrés, is devoted to the cultural giants who populated Cocteau’s world. Portraits of figures such as Sarah Bernhardt and Pablo Picasso reveal not only admiration, but a myth-making impulse — Cocteau elevates his contemporaries into symbolic figures, capturing their essence rather than their likeness.

The exhibition also highlights the pivotal role of music, theatre, and dance in Cocteau’s creative network. Works dedicated to collaborators like Erik Satie and Francis Poulenc illustrate how these artistic friendships pushed him toward radical experimentation, while a final section devoted to dancers and writers underscores the collaborative spirit that animated his work across decades.

What emerges is a portrait of Cocteau defined as much by connection and exchange as by individual genius. For Cocteau, portraiture was never a matter of faithful representation, but of emotional truth — a way of translating shared intensity, admiration, and creative tension into line and form.

Presented in the Bastion, a site inseparable from Cocteau’s own legacy in Menton, the exhibition reinforces the town’s role as a guardian of his memory. Through thoughtful curation and rare works, it offers visitors a compelling opportunity to engage with Cocteau not as a distant cultural icon, but as a living presence shaped by friendship, dialogue, and artistic risk.

For seasoned admirers and newcomers alike, this exhibition provides an intimate encounter with the creative forces that defined one of the 20th century’s most influential and elusive figures.