Was it to buy protection? Very much a public figure by the 1940s Cocteau was

Was it to buy protection? Very much a public figure by the 1940s, Cocteau was denounced regularly in the collaborationist press as a homosexual and a communist (the latter untrue). “Is it attractive because of some fundamental sense of unbelonging?” he asks. Cocteau failed; Jacob died.Italian artist Enrico David, who contributed to Chaimowicz’s Norwich show, suggests Cocteau may have been seduced, like many other artists, by the sentimental rootedness that fascism seemed to offer. Performances of his plays, Les parents terribles and La machine ?crire, provoked right-wing riots and were closed by the German police. Moreover, his lover and leading man, Jean Marais, was definitely in the Resistance, and so in constant danger.

How wrong you were to expose yourself among the censors.”)What are we to make of Cocteau’s blatant support for a fascist artist? Even after nearly 60 years, it provides scant comfort to recognise that life under enemy occupation is more complicated than history would like it to be. The occasion was Breker’s exhibition at the Paris Orangerie, and even now, the hyperbolic makes uneasy reading. (Cocteau’s comrades were horrified: “Freud, Kafka, Chaplin are forbidden by the same people who honour Breker,” the poet Paul Eluard wrote to Cocteau “We used to see you among the forbidden. It is this tranversalisme that informed “Jean Cocteau”, Chaimowicz’s recent group show in Norwich, which featured work from 12 artists, including Cerith Wyn Evans, Enrico David, Warhol and Tom of Finland.It’s by the inclusion of this last artist that Chaimowicz really throws down the gauntlet, for it raises questions about the most controversial aspect of Cocteau’s work, namely the intersection between desire and power. Best known for his pencil drawings of pneumatically endowed men in improbably optimistic poses, it can be argued that Tom of Finland’s sadomasochist illustrations are an erotic – and necessarily homosexual – offshoot of the hyper-masculine in figurative art.

For all his kitsch, there is never any doubt that these are figures, which, even in their fantastical elements, represent a subversion of male bonding. The difficult arises when, as in totalitarian art, the representation of the body is deployed to serve a different vision.If Cocteau made one mistake in his life, it was a monumental one. In 1942, on the front page of the journal, Comoedia, he published his salute to Arno Breker Comparisons to Michelangelo were invoked. Breker, who specialised in the muscled supermen so well-suited to the Nazi vision of its manhood, was Hitler’s chosen sculptor: he was to granite what Leni Riefenstahl was to celluloid.