Museum Is a Cocteau Shrine

The 10-year-old Severin Wunderman Museum in Irvine was founded by Severin Wunderman, creator and board chairman of the Severin Group, which manufactures and distributes Gucci timepieces worldwide.

The Belgium-born Wunderman, 55, developed a fascination as a youth with seminal 20th-Century French artist, writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, to whom the museum is dedicated. Wunderman’s Laguna Beach home (up for sale) is one of his five residences in the United States, Switzerland and France.

The museum, which shares the Severin Group’s corporate headquarters, houses Wunderman’s collection of hundreds of drawings, paintings, sculptures, tapestries and other pieces by or relating to Cocteau. Among those with whom Cocteau collaborated are such luminaries as Stravinsky, Picasso and Serge Diaghilev, whose Ballets Russes troupe starred Vaslav Nijinsky in the early part of the century.