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n the Spring of 1950, having just wrapped the film adaptation
of his novel Les Enfants Terribles, Jean Cocteau went to
spend a week in a handsome, turreted villa in Saint-Jean-Cap-
Ferrat on the French Riviera. Known then as the Villa Santo
Sospir, by the time Cocteau left 11 years later it had become
infamous as ‘la villa tatouée’ — the tattooed villa — thanks to
the dandy painter’s deft hand with charcoal and brush.
At the time, the house was the summer residence of
Françine Weisweiller, a Parisian socialite and patron of Yves Saint
Laurent. Weisweiller was the cousin of actress Nicole Stéphane,
who plays Elisabeth in Les Enfants Terribles, and it was Stéphane who
introduced the two during filming. It was un coup de foudre, the pair
of eccentrics hitting it off right away.
Perched on cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean, the villa —
decorated by the great Madeleine Castaing — was simply whitewashed
in accordance with the style of the region when the 61-year-old artist
arrived with his 25-year-old “adopted son” Edouard Dermit. Like any
artist confronted with a blank canvas, the desire to leave his mark was
compelling. Cocteau asked his hostess if he might draw, above the
fireplace, a mural of Apollo, the Greek god of music and art, poetry
and archery. So delighted were the new pals with the result that they
decided Cocteau should carry on. As he put it shortly afterwards:
“I was imprudent enough to decorate one wall and Matisse said to
me, ‘If you decorate one wall of a room, you have to do them all.’ ”
The location’s rocky outcrops and sapphire waters reminded the
artist of the Aegean, and so he drew upon his knowledge of Greek
mythology for the drawings. So, a muscle-bound Dionysus reclines,
giddily drunk in one bedroom. Narcissus and the nymph Echo are
tête-à-tête in another. A naked Diana, startled by mortal Actaeon while
bathing with her escort of nymphs, turns the hapless hunter into a deer.Drawing directly on the walls without preliminary sketches, Cocteau
displaced neither furniture nor fixture, often painting over objects
where they lay. A lampshade is graffitied with effigies. The belly of one
nude seems pregnant with books. Everywhere, his gesture is archly
confident, his touch whimsical but self-assured. Erotic, naive, it’s like
living inside a giant sketchpad.
Cocteau covered all available surfaces in charcoal drawings before
going back over them with a mix of tempera, pigment and raw milk.
The effect is dreamy, ethereal. Later, he designed fabric wall-hangings
to drape over bare surfaces and even over drawings. Occasionally,
he painted the interiors of cupboards, or covered paintings with
patterned curtains. “And when we no longer know where to hang our
paintings,” he said, “we hang them outside, on the trees.”
In 1951, Cocteau directed a Kodachrome film in which he gives
a guided tour of the villa now tattooed. Grainy, with bold dabs of
vibrant colour, it is the very definition of painterly filmmaking. The
villa, he says, “is another world, a world in which it is indispensable to
forget the one in which we live”. Littered with visual puns and surreal
effects, much like his The Blood of a Poet (1930) and Orpheus (1950),
the film shows doors open of their own accord onto bathrobes that
appear as ghosts. A spiral of cigarette smoke rises in front of a painted
face. The hairless, suntanned hands of the dandy poet are shown
in tight crop, twirling a petunia that appears to fold and unfold,
magically, repetitively. At one point, he films his arm in silhouette,
shadowed over a flowerbed, moving like that of a compass. »this page: Cocteau began ‘tattooing’ the villa with a figure of
Greek god Apollo over the fireplace in the living room. Other
mythical figures soon followed. opposite page: in the dining
room, woven branches line the walls; tapestry by Cocteau.