In my survey of sacred artists of the modern era from France, newly added to the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection, we turn this week to Jean Cocteau, the multi-talented enfant terrible of 20th century French culture. Best known as the director of the 1946 visionary film version of Beauty and the Beast, Cocteau made his mark in an extraordinary variety of artistic disciplines. For many, his life, itself, was an artistic creation, lived with an eye for the limelight, enveloped in the scandals of his openly gay lifestyle and his longtime opium addiction. Figuring in the Cocteau life drama was a drug-cleansed return to the Roman Catholic Church in 1925. However wobbly his “conversion” might have been, Cocteau remained connected to the Catholic faith all his life—in his own self-referential way. The collection contains lithographs of a monumental mural project in a chapel on the Riveria dedicated to St. Peter and a poignant drawing of Christ on the Cross, dating from the last year of his life, now on view in the gallery of the new Cocteau profile page. (John Kohan)