Throughout history, artists have decamped from sweltering capitals to work in more temperate climes—some to an astonishingly productive degree. Gustav Klimt’s 16 seasons on Lake Attersee, at the foot of the Austrian Alps, not only inducted the Viennese portraitist into landscape painting, but also bonded him to Emilie Flöge, the young couturier who inspired the most treasured works of his peak “Golden Phase,” from 1901 to 1909. Thirty years later, during a week on the Côte d’Azur, Jean Cocteau met a different kind of muse—the villa where his fanciful drawings on the interior walls would earn it national landmark status. Off and on over 24 years, the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle occupied four acres of the princely Tuscan estate on which she built her fantastical Tarot Garden, the Pop Surrealist’s crowning achievement. De Saint Phalle’s husband and collaborator, Jean Tinguely, also took on a decade-spanning project in the form of a monumental sculpture tucked within a forest outside Paris.
Homes away from home have served their present-day counterparts equally as well. To the continued amazement of Kiki Smith, a walk-in sculpture that the German-born American installed two years ago in a Bavarian public garden has been doing triple duty as an artwork, a Roman Catholic chapel, and a popular tourist destination. Joan Jonas has appropriated the breathtaking landscape outside her summer home and studio in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, for numerous installations of sculpture and video throughout the octogenarian artist’s groundbreaking career. And it was a summer on Syros, the capital of the Cyclades Islands in Greece, that catapulted the late Martin Kippenberger into new artistic territory by compelling him to create a museum of modern art on the Aegean. It had no walls, lights, plumbing, or collections, but over time its three-year existence has become its own Greek myth.
After meeting on the Parisian film set of Les Enfants Terribles in 1949, the socialite and arts patron Francine Weisweiller invited Jean Cocteau to spend a week at Villa Santo Sospir, her vacation home on the tip of Cap Ferrat. Until their falling out 12 years later, the irrepressible artist, filmmaker, and raconteur was less a frequent houseguest than a roommate, and practically a sibling. Their friendship evolved from his first visit, when the artist began amusing himself, his host, and, later, such prominent guests as Pablo Picasso, Yves Saint Laurent, and Marlene Dietrich, by painting sultry and somnolent, mythological figures of fluid sexuality and disproportionate anatomies on the whitewashed walls of every room in the house.
It was consuming, sometimes dangerous, work. While painting the vaulted ceiling over a staircase to the lower level, Cocteau fell down the stairs on multiple occasions. He describes one incident in a 16-mm documentary short he made about the house in 1952. The film is as charming as the drawings it brings almost literally to life in the Surrealist manner of Cocteau’s 1946 classic, Beauty and the Beast. (In 1959, he also shot Testament of Orpheus at the villa, costuming Weisweiller in a Balenciaga gown.)
In the documentary, Cocteau describes his narrative decorations as “tattoos” for the “skin” of the house. “I didn’t need to dress the walls,” he explains. “I had to draw on their surface. That’s why I made line frescoes with colors that echo tattoo art. Santo Sospir is a tattooed villa.” He demonstrates the way he incorporated Echo and Narcissus, or Ulysses and the Sirens, within the design, beginning with the niche over a living room fireplace framed between his drawing of Apollo, the sun god, attended by sybaritic priests. The doorframe in one bedroom cushions the head of a monumental female figure sleeping in the sunlight from a window. A “billy goat room” features a frieze of unicorns and satyrs modeled, perhaps, on young sycophants among the fisherman of his later home in nearby Villefranche. Francine’s bedroom illustrates Actaeon’s surprised sighting of Diana in the bath, a shock that turns him into a stag. The total effect is magical.
On subsequent visits, Cocteau added a mosaic tile path through the garden and hung an Aubusson tapestry in the dining room. (It depicts Judith carrying the head of Holofernes like a handbag, inspired by the deuterocanonical Book of Judith.) As the summers passed, he worked on new paintings in a garden studio below the peninsula’s lighthouse. After Weisweiller’s daughter, Carole, opened the house for public viewing, the French government listed it as a national treasure, requiring subsequent owners to maintain the interiors as Cocteau left them. That did not dissuade Ilia Melia, a Russian émigré and real estate developer, from buying the villa for his family and closing it for a top-to-bottom restoration. It is now available for private tours.
This is an excerpt from PALMER Vol. 8. To read the full story, click here to purchase the issue.