Chanel 1932

This is an ink drawing by Jean Cocteau, and he’s just laid down the barest essentials: hair, necklace, lapels, chair. It's a real outline of something. I wonder if he was thinking about style itself, like what is the minimum you need to convey the most? There's something so chic about it being unfinished. It makes me think about Cy Twombly’s line drawings, so spare and elegant. Both artists seem like they're casually tossing off the image, when actually it's totally thought through. Cocteau was a poet, playwright, novelist, designer, filmmaker, visual artist, critic, and composer. He reminds us that all these fields feed into each other. You can see how his poetry and film making seeps into his drawings and his drawings back into his films. It’s this constant looping and layering of ideas. Artists are always looking at each other’s work, remixing it, having a silent conversation across time.