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Jean Cocteau
Drawings
Collection Kinzel-Schilling, Basel
His connection to the avant-garde seemed almost preordained. The French poet, draughtsman, painter and director Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) was one of the most active and versatile French artists of his generation. Born into a bourgeois family, he took up drawing at an early age and soon made up for his undistinguished school career with literary writing. Cocteau moved between fields as diverse as opera, dance, literature, fashion and advertising. Through his collaborations with giants such as Picasso and Tristan Tzara, he emerged as an artist who, like few others, embodies the ruptures and creative explosiveness of his era.
For the first time, the entire private Kinzel-Schilling Collection is being exhibited. Previously, individual works on loan from the collection were shown in the exhibition Jean Cocteau. The Juggler’s Revenge (Jean Cocteau. La rivincita del giocoliere), held at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2024.
The generous loans from the private Kinzel-Schilling Collection to FOR ART open up Jean Cocteau’s work with a focus on his mastery of drawing. Portraits of friends and companions, among them composers, writers and figures of the stage, evoke the 1920s – the era of Surrealism and rebellion against every rigid convention. Intimate portraits lead to designs for Le Livre Blanc, an autobiographically inspired text first published anonymously in 1928, which openly addresses homoerotic desire. With hallucinatory immediacy, Cocteau wrests pages of pain from his withdrawal from opium: the intoxication that loosens the boundaries between dream, fantasy and reality takes its toll and fuels the self-fashioning of a modern, vulnerable artist. Letters, books and posters trace paths into a broad literary and publishing network.
FOR ART, Rittergasse 25, Basel
Exhibition dates: 18 September – 7 November 2026
Opening hours: every Friday and Saturday, 11 am–6 pm, admission free
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more about FOR ART – A Temporary Art Intervention by Littmann Kulturprojekte. Basel 2025–2028