Jean Cocteau

French artist and writer (1898-1963), Jean Cocteau made his name widely known in poetry, fiction, film, ballet, art, and opera. In everything he did there is a reflection of surrealism, psychoanalysis, cubism, and his Catholic religion, occasionally influenced by opium and often homoerotically explicit. In his time Cocteau was a promoter of the avant-garde whose friends included Picasso, Marcel Proust, Erik Satie and Diaghilev. His family was wealthy and politically prominent. His attorney father's suicide when Cocteau was only nine years old made a deep impression central to his entire life, creating a sense of human weakness that could only be  compensated by service in the performing arts with loyalty to the mysterious forces in the universe; to quote the poet--"poetry is the basis of all art, a religion without hope; the worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.”