In the dispute which has existed for eight years between the municipality of Menton and the Mutual Insurance Company of Local Authorities (SMACL), the courts have rendered a decision favorable to the city. On June 8, the Nice administrative court recognized storm Adrian, which occurred in 2018 on the outskirts of the coastal city, as the exclusive cause of the disaster suffered by the Jean Cocteau Museum, which has since closed. The insurer, required to pay 3.4 million euros to the city, announced that it would appeal.
Strong gusts of wind and waves 7 meters high had caused significant damage to the museum, located on the seafront. If the building designed by architect Rudy Ricciotti had been damaged, the extent of the damage mainly concerned the collections. The vast majority of works affected by the flooding of the conservation spaces were able to be restored, but the museum recorded around sixty losses. Disagreeing over the estimated amount of reparations, the parties took the case to court. Since then, the renovation process has been at a standstill, awaiting the outcome of the dispute, postponed by long delays in technical expertise and administrative procedures. Despite the continuation of the appeal, the mayor of Menton Alexandra Masson (RN) declared her intention to start the work without delay, even if it meant having to advance the sum owed by the insurer. Then elected in opposition, she was among the voices which denounced a lack of transparency on the part of the former town hall in the report of the stages.
The decision rendered at first instance is a light at the end of the tunnel for the Citrus City and its flagship museum. Inaugurated in 2011 thanks to a donation from the American-Belgian collector Séverin Wunderman, the museum houses the largest Jean Cocteau collection in the world. It reflects the artist’s versatility with numerous self-portraits, preparatory drawings for his films, and posters. Great names in modernism, such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Amedeo Modigliani, appear alongside him in the museum’s collections, which attracted between 40,000 and 50,000 visitors per year before its closure.
Inspired by the world of Cocteau, the facade of the building imitates the wavy lines and purity characteristic of his drawings. Its modern and atypical architecture, for which 15 million euros had been invested by the municipality, make it a marker of the city’s landscape.
Another shadow hanging over the Jean Cocteau Museum is that of the Wunderman Foundation. In 2025, the donor’s heirs showed their impatience with a summons, addressed to the town of Menton, to return the entire legacy received twenty years earlier. From their point of view, the museum no longer meets the conditions of permanent and uninterrupted exhibition provided for by the donation. Faced with the formal notice, Yves Juhel (LR), former councilor of the town, had invoked to L’Obs the principle of inalienability of museum collections, enshrined in the Heritage Code. He also countered the Wundermans’ arguments that the works kept in the Ricciotti building were regularly exhibited in Menton museums, as part of an off-site program.
At the Bastion Museum, opened in 1966 in a 17th century building following a bequest from Cocteau, visitors can still enjoy the Wunderman collection. In 2018, just after the disaster, the Innamorati series (1960-1969) was brought together in the historic fort. Conceived in two parts, the exhibition with the bittersweet title “A collection in all its states” presented in 2022 and 2023 the works rescued from storm Adrian. The Palais de l’Europe, another place in the town, hosted in 2025 the masterpieces of the Wunderman collection, bringing together Cocteau, Sarah Bernhardt and several modernist painters.
The terrible children (1929), Cocteau’s novel set against bourgeois norms, contains an intertext rich in all the art forms on which it was nourished. A poet, he was close to the surrealists like Giorgio de Chirico, who accompanied his collection Mythology with ten lithographs in 1934. As a playwright, his play La machine infernale (1934), a modernist rewriting of the myth of Oedipus, is a must for avant-garde theater. His line faces continue to exert a strong influence on contemporary visual culture.
If Paris was the center of Cocteau’s life, Menton was also an important stage in his life and his work: in the 1950s, he designed a mythological fresco in the town hall’s wedding hall. The opportunity to develop a new technique, in which he fills the contours of faces with colored sinuous lines, which he will designate as the “Menton style”.
