Chloë Cassens, representative of the Jean Cocteau Museum, is not so much a time machine as a time collapser. When I talk to her about Cocteau—the French poet, playwright and film director, who was one of the foremost avant-garde artists of the 20th century—persons long dead shimmer with renewed vibrancy. Dramas between Cocteau and his lovers (like Jean Marais), friends (like Coco Chanel) and enemies (like André Breton) feel as juicy and urgent as those on the cover of People magazine. That is because 31-year-old Cassens speaks with an art historian’s fastidious attention to detail and with a passion that communicates her love of Cocteau and his time period in Paris.
For those who aren’t familiar with Cocteau, the artist left home at age 15, published his first book of poetry at age 19 and became associated with writers like Marcel Proust in his early 20s. He would go on to publish twenty-three books of poetry, five novels and twenty-two plays, make eleven films and collaborate with numerous writers, artists, dancers and composers, including Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Guillaume Apollinaire and Eric Satie. However, it was a drawing of iconic Cocteau character Dargelos that caught the eye of 19-year-old Holocaust survivor Séverin Wunderman—a man who would later invent the fashion watch and amass the largest collection of Cocteau artworks in the world.
As a student of history and an educator, Cassens is acutely aware of the stakes surrounding Cocteau’s legacy. Cocteau was labeled a degenerate artist by the Nazis who occupied Paris in the early 1940s. He was an openly gay man, which further made him a target. History, as we are coming to understand, is not linear but circular—or, perhaps, spiracular. With nationalism on the rise everywhere, coupled with the creation of racially motivated detention centers and the revocation of queer rights, there is much to be learned from how artists like Cocteau survived fascism—as well as much to be lost when such stories get left behind. Observer spoke to Cassens about erasure, cultural revisionism and why sitting with discomfort is so important.
It seems like overlooked women and queer surrealists are getting some attention now. A piece by female surrealist Dorothea Tanning sold for a record-breaking $2.3 million at Christie’s last May. Why do you think that is?
The centennial of Surrealism was celebrated last October. And as with any big anniversary, people tend to go, okay, what do we know now that we didn’t know then? That is particularly true with the Surrealists, because today we can look back on André Breton—the anniversary was literally of Breton’s manifesto—and acknowledge that guy was violent. He was a misogynist. He was racist. He was homophobic. Cocteau was not an official Surrealist in part because he didn’t want to be associated with a set movement, but also because Breton fully hated his guts. We’re reassessing so much, even from the late 1990s and early 2000s, about who was left behind and how we can bring them into their rightful place in culture.
What do you think it takes to revise history? How do you—as a representative of the Séverin Wunderman Collection—contribute to that revisionist history? And how do you know it’s working?
I’m constantly writing, lecturing, speaking and preaching. I can’t tell you how many times I’ll ask someone: Are you familiar with the greatest works of Jean Cocteau? I sometimes feel like that line Lady Gaga gave over and over during the A Star is Born press tour, “There’s 100 people in the room and 99 don’t believe in you, but one person believes in you and that’s all that matters.” But in the art world, things operate on a more extended timeline. A Dorothea Tanning painting, selling at a record price not that long ago, is great. Let’s hope the pattern continues for female surrealists, past and present. I think it’ll be more evident in two, five, ten or twenty years, seeing how many museum retrospectives they are getting.
Right. Is an auction record indicative of a true cultural shift, or—
Or is it lip service? It’s just a waiting game. I’m optimistic. Recently, I went to the opening reception for two exhibits at the Getty: “$3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives” and “Queer Lens.” And they’re both so monumental, and Jean Cocteau is really present, via a portrait of him in “Queer Lens” and his drawings and original books in “$3 Bill,” which was really surprising. I don’t think there’s been this much Cocteau in a museum show in California ever. And then there’s “Queer Lens,” which is all photographs from the early-mid 1800s through today—I learned so much from that exhibit. Eadweard Muybridge, who invented the motion picture, recorded a film of two women kissing. And it’s considered to be the first film of people kissing at all.
Oh, wow.
I had no idea. There were photos of people in drag as far back as 1850, which is not surprising. At the same time, there is something to be said about the timing of these exhibits being opened now that LGBTQ+ rights are so at risk in the U.S.
What do you feel are the stakes of being the representative of the Jean Cocteau Museum?
I think the stakes are quite high. There are so many people in Cocteau’s orbit who, in his time, were the biggest deal, and today, a Google search comes up with little to nothing about them. If you don’t continue to write the history and keep his name in people’s mouths, it will fade away. That kind of erasure, whether conscious or through a kind of atrophy, allows for what’s happening now to happen at a more accelerated pace. Like where people think trans people have never existed, so we can legislate them out of existence. If you study history, you know that that’s just not true.
Can you describe your grandfather, Séverin Wunderman, and how he came to amass the largest Cocteau collection in the world? And why Cocteau?
That is the question of my life: why Cocteau? I have a different answer depending on the day. But my grandfather survived the Holocaust. He was a hidden child. He made his name and fortune by inventing the fashion watch, which he made with Gucci. He founded and owned the license and the manufacturing for Gucci timepieces, which in the mid-to-late 1970s through the mid-1990s, kept Gucci afloat financially. With his earnings, from the time he was 19 years old and had no money through to when he died in 2008, my grandfather was completely obsessed with Cocteau. He bought his first Cocteau piece when he was just a teenager; he saw it in a shop window and didn’t know what it was, he just really liked it and had to have it. He spent a week’s wages on it. Over time, as he earned more money and was more successful and had more access to the art world, he was able to amass this massive collection of Cocteau and also artworks by his contemporaries. By the end of my grandfather’s life, he donated a massive percentage of the collection back to France, like 85 to 90 percent of it. And France built the official Jean Cocteau Museum in Menton for it. As far as why Cocteau, I think my grandfather was just really drawn to beauty in art, in fashion, in women and in general. Cocteau’s work, even when it’s challenging, is very beautiful.
Coco Chanel was a big supporter of Cocteau’s. Was there any relationship between Coco and your grandfather?
It’s funny, my grandfather never met Jean Cocteau. I like to joke that my grandfather was the only straight guy collecting Cocteau. Because outside of France, if people know about Cocteau, they know him as a queer icon. But my grandfather was obsessed with women in his life wearing Chanel. In his mind, an elegant woman was always in Chanel drip. I remember, right before he died, when I turned 13, I didn’t have a bat mitzvah, but he took me to the Chanel store and hooked me up because “You are a woman now,” and elegant women wear Chanel and only Chanel. Cocteau actually sketched a lot of Chanel’s designs in the 1930s. She put him on retainer, and a lot of the time, that was the only real money that he earned.
It’s interesting to observe Cocteau’s place in World War II, France, because he was friends with Chanel, who was sleeping with Nazis, while he himself was targeted by Nazis for being a degenerate and for being homosexual. His life partner, who he was living with during the war, Jean Marais, was at one point put on a list for deportation. Cocteau called his friend Arnaud Brecker, who was Hitler’s favorite artist, to get him off the list. Today, we think of that period as being so black and white when it comes to who was good and who was bad. But there were a lot of people who were just doing their best to get through the day alive in whatever way they could. I think it’s an important historical lesson. There are always going to be people on either extreme of the spectrum. There are going to be people who are in the street getting arrested, getting tear-gassed, like we saw in L.A. There are also people who are doing things under the radar. And it might seem like they’re not doing anything, and that is a bad look. But then it’ll turn out that maybe they’ve been doing something really important all along, and they just couldn’t talk about it, because it’s not advantageous. I don’t think the human condition loves nuance, particularly in our time. I really try to force people to sit with the discomfort of things not being black and white because they are gray the majority of the time.
I love that. What made you realize that you needed to be the representative of this collection?
My grandfather really saw in me, my cousins and my sister the qualities that would emerge when we became adults, and liked to nourish them. I have a cousin who’s a fine artist, and he was always hooking her up with canvases and paints and watercolors. In my sister, he saw a highly intelligent mathematical brain, so they would play dominoes and games that involved math together. For me, he saw that I was really into Cocteau. As a kid, after breakfast, he would tell me to go get a notebook and a pen, and he would walk me through his house and all of the art inside of it and have me take notes. With a glitter gel pen and Lisa Frank notebooks, I’m writing information at seven years old about Jean Cocteau pieces, right? I studied and researched and wrote a lot about Cocteau as a teenager and in university. Then I graduated and was living my own life, working as a sex educator. In the middle of the night one night, I was like, I think I need to be doing Cocteau things. And because I’m a sex educator, I have the capacity to educate people. That’s the very, very short version. In a weird way, it’s like every step has led to where I am now.
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