Iceblink Luck Crewneck

ORDERS OPEN: 2/19/26
ORDERS CLOSE: 2/23/26
TO PRINT: 2/24/26

PRINTED ON LAA HF09 BLACK CREW NECK SWEATSHIRTS.

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Like so many groups formed in the 1980s post-punk wave, their beginnings were humble: Elizabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie, and Will Heggie—the original lineup—were young, shy, self-effacing, awkward, taciturn, frequently profane and circumspect working class teens who, like fellow Scots The Jesus and Mary Chain, to whom they would be occasionally compared, had little else to do but have a go at making music, despite, or perhaps because of, their lack of musical training. Boredom, after all, can be a great motivator. Though they may have had some inkling—Robin and Will had played in other bands before forming Cocteau Twins, so they weren’t completely inexperienced—few others could have anticipated the rich vein of expression they would mine in the years following their debut, when they burst onto the British independent music scene fully formed, a kind of self-possessed singularity.

From the start, their music defied description (but not comparison). There was more than a hint of things to come, as Helen FitzGerald surely saw in her generous 1982 piece on Garlands for Sounds magazine: “Where have these creatures sprung from, what dastardly corporate skulduggery can explain their unannounced and almost unprecedented leap to the forefront of our attention? Well, for once, bribery, corruption and deceit are blameless. The fact of the matter is that the album is bloody good, a fluid frieze of wispy images made all the more haunting by Elizabeth’s distilled vocal maturity, fluctuating from a brittle fragility to a voluble dexterity with full range and power.” The more music Cocteau Twins made, the less comparable they became to anything, or anyone, else. They were becoming their own branch on the musical family tree. Jean Cocteau was a multifaceted intellectual who, from the 1920s to the 1950s, worked as a writer, draftsman, painter, printmaker, stage designer, and filmmaker. Cocteau’s artistic practice was closely tied to his roles as an instigator and patron of the visual and literary French avant-gardes, as well as a socialite.

By the 1920s Cocteau’s writings and drawings, which he had started making around 1917, played a key role in modernism’s return to classical themes. Like many other artists and poets during this time period, he demonstrated a renewed interest in Catholicism spearheaded by the philosopher Jacques Maritain. In 1925 Cocteau’s first major drama, Orphée, a synthesis of antiquity and modernism, fantasy and reality, reached the stage in Paris. The following year Cocteau published Le Rappel à l’ordre: discipline et liberté, the title of which has come to stand for the general trend toward classicism in the arts of the 1920s.

‘I am nothing – “another” speaks in me,’ declared Jean Cocteau in a Paris Review interview published in 1964, just a few months after his death. ‘The Juggler’s Revenge’, at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, illustrates the accuracy of his self-assessment: his imagination resembled a hall of mirrors, an infinite machine of collage and juxtaposition. The photograph on the cover of the catalogue depicts the artist as a six-armed figure holding a book, a fountain pen, a pair of scissors, a cigarette, a paintbrush, while one hand rests upturned at his waist as if awaiting his next task. Cocteau was a polymath, a protean conjurer of worlds, a juggler – and, if the curators are correct, this exhibition offers revenge on all the critics who called him a dilettante. Despite his near-Warholian embrace of surface, celebrity and everything new (‘I myself do not’ read anything serious, he said in the same interview), he inhabited a world of ancient myth and melodrama, creating a friendly environment for both his sexuality and his desire to identify as a poet.

Despite Cocteau’s flair as a draughtsman, most of the drawings come across as playful ephemera that punctuated his life as a storyteller. Cocteau was a magnificent thief, adapting old stories and ideas – the poet doesn’t invent but listen, he said.