Musée Jean Cocteau - Le Bastion
Musée Jean Cocteau - Le Bastion stands in Menton, France, inside a seventeenth-century fort beside the harbour. The stone building contains Jean Cocteau’s drawings, paintings, ceramics, lithographs and tapestries from his Mediterranean period.
Honoré II, Prince of Monaco, commissioned the fort in 1619, and construction ended in 1636. Its former guardroom, kitchen and gunpowder magazine later gave way to uses as a salt storehouse, lighthouse and wartime prison. In the 1950s, Cocteau helped restore the abandoned structure and decorated its alcoves, reception hall and outer walls with pebble mosaics. Édouard Dermit completed the work after Cocteau’s death, and the museum opened in 1966 with 102 pieces.
The collection includes the Innamorati and Sphinxes wax-pastel series, Judith and Holofernes tapestry, and sketches for Menton’s wedding hall. Look for the pebble lizard on the ground-floor floor, which Cocteau described as a symbol of Mediterranean laziness, and the carved Grimaldi crest above the upper-level doorway.
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- Menton
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