Cocteau insisted throughout his life on the unity of his work — the poems, the novels, the plays, the films, the drawings, the chapels — describing them all as poetry in different forms, and his standing in twentieth-century European art rests on the seriousness with which he was able to make that claim across an extraordinary range of media.
Cocteau came up at one of the most generative moments in modern European art. He published his first poems in his late teens and was already a recognized young figure in Parisian literary circles by his early twenties. His exposure to Diaghilev's 1913 production of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was, by his own later account, the formative artistic event of his life: the experience of seeing the avant-garde realized in collaborative, total-art form turned him into a lifelong advocate of the kind of cross-disciplinary work that would define his career.
The First World War cemented his place in the Parisian avant-garde. He served as an ambulance driver, befriended Apollinaire, Modigliani, and the painters of the Cubist circle, and his 1917 collaboration with Diaghilev, Picasso, and Satie has been widely described as the inaugural Cubist ballet and the beginning of his lifelong relationship with Picasso. The 1920s and 1930s produced the novels and plays that established him as a major French writer, while his friendships with Picasso, Stravinsky, Coco Chanel, Raymond Radiguet, and others kept him at the centre of a particular kind of Parisian avant-garde sociability.
His turn to cinema produced the first of the four films that would constitute his Orphic cycle and one of the founding works of European avant-garde film. The career as a filmmaker continued in parallel with his work in every other medium he practiced, and the postwar films brought him popular international success and confirmed the depth of his cinematic vision.
The visual arts moved to the centre of his practice in the postwar years. The decorations he made for chapels, town halls, and private residences along the Côte d'Azur are among the most distinctive late twentieth-century examples of an artist absorbing the medieval and Mediterranean traditions of public sacred decoration into a modern personal vocabulary. He produced drawings prolifically throughout his life, with a recognizable line of contour figures, mythological subjects, and self-portraits that became one of the most identifiable graphic styles of the period.
His position in twentieth-century European culture today is that of an artist of unusual range whose project — the unification of poetry, theatre, cinema, and the visual arts under a single conception of poésie — was carried out with extraordinary energy across a broad span of work, and whose reputation has continued to grow since his death.