When the madcap American heiress and audacious art collector Peggy Guggenheim founded her first gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, in London, her adviser Marcel Duchamp proposed she inaugurate the space with a Jean Cocteau show. To make the necessary arrangements, Guggenheim visited the protean artist in Paris, where he received her in bed in an opium haze. In time for the opening on January 24, 1938, Cocteau sent his patron a series of drawings related to his recent play Knights of the Round Table, along with his largest work to date, Fear Giving Wings to Courage. But this ambitious picture, rendered on a cotton bedsheet in pencil, chalk, crayon, and—apparently—blood, never made it into the show. Deemed obscene and confiscated by British customs agents, the figurative allegory was finally released to Duchamp and Guggenheim, on condition that they not exhibit it publicly. According to Guggenheim, “It was not the nude but the pubic hairs which worried them.”
This banned artwork now serves as the centerpiece to “Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge,” an exhibition that opens today at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, in Venice. Curated by the N.Y.U. art historian and Cocteau specialist Kenneth E. Silver, it’s the most comprehensive retrospective of the Frenchman’s oeuvre ever organized in Italy, bringing together a trove of images and objects that would have given the British censors pause. Among the risqué rarities on view are a copy of Cocteau’s anonymously written homoerotic 1928 novel, Le Livre Blanc;studies of bare-bottomed, randy sailors; a 1936 depiction of the artist’s partner smoking opium in the buff (pubic hair included); and issues of American 1950s “physique” magazines, embellished with the artist’s libidinous scribbles.
