Arriving in a paradise that caters to retirees looking for gentle waves and lemon groves, Chloë Cassens gripped her scorpion necklace and tensed her shoulders.
She was summoning the strength of her grandfather, a Holocaust survivor whose business empire was built on a talent for confrontation. The scorpion had become her avatar in a crusade against what she insisted was a case of corruption on the French Riviera — one that involved a freakish storm, a crumbling museum and an enfant terrible of modern art.
“Some family members think I’m insane for coming back here,” Cassens said, walking through the sunny streets of Menton, France, in full black attire. It was her latest visit on a yearslong quest to prove that the city had mishandled her grandfather’s legacy — a quest that also pushed her to embrace a more aggressive side of her personality. “Nut up,” she said she’d been telling herself. “You are going to have to get over this anxious feeling of being perceived.”
Menton, a coastal city near the border with Italy, was where her grandfather Severin Wunderman had donated his collection of some 1,800 artworks, half of them by the French artist Jean Cocteau. In exchange, Menton built a jewel box museum, designed by the architect Rudy Ricciotti, to display them. But that jewel box became a ruin in 2018, less than a decade after the museum opened and her grandfather died.
Cassens said the architect had ignored local engineers and placed the museum on the shoreline with an open staircase leading to its basement archives. A storm destroyed the building after seawater overwhelmed its glass walls. Emergency crews waded through floodwater to retrieve hundreds of damaged paintings, illustrations and prints. The possibility of losing this vital archive of a beloved French artist was an unthinkable disaster.
Years of careful restoration saved most of the damaged artworks, but the museum remained closed. Local officials have blamed an insurance company for the delay, saying they cannot proceed with reconstruction until Menton receives $3.5 million in compensation, about a third of the estimated repair cost. The Wunderman family has refused to accept the delay and sued the city to regain control of the artworks in January, claiming that Menton and the French government had violated an agreement to exhibit the Cocteau collection in perpetuity.
Among the complaints listed in the lawsuit was an accusation of “significant moral harm,” suggesting that the city had damaged the family patriarch’s legacy.
“We understand their frustrations,” said Guillaume Theulière, who until recently was the director of the city’s museum network. He emphasized that officials were doing everything within their power to remedy the situation. “The most difficult thing,” he said, “is waiting.”
Cassens was done waiting. It was time to act like the poets and dreamers who were heroes for Cocteau.
A Grandfather’s Long Shadow
Cassens, a 32-year-old amateur art historian, has spent a lifetime studying her grandfather’s career and trying to understand his Cocteau obsession. Known as the “Time Lord” of the fashion watch industry, he built a $500 million company in the 1970s through a licensing agreement to design and manufacture Gucci timepieces. He told family members that he had secured the deal in a screaming match with Aldo Gucci.
“I was kind of like his living doll,” Cassens recalled of a childhood being pulled from elementary school and whisked to boardroom meetings. Wunderman showered Cassens with praise, a private-school education in Switzerland, and homes in Los Angeles and Paris. During summers, she would read books in the skull-encrusted chair that he had installed in the wine cellar of his French chateau.
“My grandfather was a spooky-ooky guy,” Cassens said.
Born to a Jewish family in Belgium at the outbreak of World War II, Wunderman spent his childhood at a convent for the blind, despite being able to see. His parents stashed him there during the Holocaust as part of the chaplain Dom Bruno’s efforts to aid the country’s resistance to the Nazis.
In Cassens’ retelling, the family was surprised when nuns refused to let Wunderman return home after the war. “We converted him. We are going to keep him,” the nuns said, according to Cassens. “My great-grandfather and granduncle came back that night, tied up all the nuns and took him back. He didn’t know who they were.”
“That was his first memory of his family,” she said: “extreme trauma.”
Cassens reasoned that her grandfather’s haunted upbringing had led to an obsession with beauty. His success designing watches allowed him to acquire edenic properties, including the sprawling French chateau. He also acquired many lovers throughout his life: six wives through seven marriages.
But his obsession with Cocteau was extraordinary. “It was hoarding,” Cassens said, explaining that her grandfather had first stumbled upon Cocteau when he was 19 and spent a week’s salary on one of the artist’s drawings. He would continue acquiring everything from Cocteau’s paintings to dinner party menus.
Cocteau’s vast output included poems, novels, paintings, drawings and feature films like his 1946 masterpiece “Beauty and the Beast.” He brought a touch of Parisian elegance into the chaos of surrealist art and became the toast of French intellectual circles — all despite an opium addiction and a reputation for getting romantically entangled with some of the most prominent actors of his time.
Although his reputation has faded since its high point in the 1950s, when he epitomized the avant-garde, Cocteau is well remembered on the French Riviera. (Quotes about his love for the region are sprinkled throughout the Nice airport.) He also left an impression on Menton, where he created mosaics for a local museum and designed the town’s wedding hall — a theatrical paean to love that includes frescoes of Greek mythological figures, red velvet curtains and a leopard carpet.
Wunderman’s obsession with Cocteau eventually led him to the actor Édouard Dermithe, the artist’s lover who starred in many of his late movies. This was in the 1990s, about three decades after Cocteau’s death. Dermithe was sick and preparing to sell the couple’s art collection piecemeal to raise money. “Severin swooped in and bought in bulk,” Cassens said.
Plagued by health complications himself, including lung cancer, Wunderman looked for a permanent home for the collection, which includes rare drawings and illustrations. In 2005, he reached a deal with Menton officials to construct a museum called the Jean Cocteau Museum/Severin Wunderman Collection. Three years later, when he died at age 69, the museum was still being constructed; Wunderman left enough money behind for his extended family to live off a trust and established a foundation to oversee his legacy.
“It was a good deal,” said Richard Tomlin, a lawyer who manages the family foundation and executed the 2005 museum contract. The city allotted nearly $17.4 million for a museum housing the $8 million art collection with a guarantee of exhibiting it permanently and continuously.
The face-palm moment, Tomlin said, was when the city approved Ricciotti’s plan of “building below sea level across from the sea.”
“We aren’t builders or engineers,” Tomlin said. “We relied on the city to make the right choices here.”
Ricciotti defended his museum design in a statement, noting the “exceptional nature of the storm” and adding that “the issue is not a recovery or restoration plan, but simply the political will to reopen it; the dispute between the various insurance companies is harming the interests of the city.”
Despite the region’s historically calm weather, Tomlin said that the city should have anticipated that a shoreline museum could flood. And for years since the 2018 storm, the family has watched as the building’s cement facade cracked and vandals defaced it with graffiti.
The political willpower behind the museum also shifted.
In 2021, the mayor who brokered the agreement, Jean-Claude Guibal, died of a heart attack. And since 2023, the French police have questioned his replacement, Yves Juhel, on suspicion of misappropriating public funds. An election scheduled for March has gained national attention because one of the candidates is Louis Sarkozy, the son of former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was recently convicted in a campaign finance scandal.
The museum, a beachfront eyesore, has become a symbol of the city’s faded reputation as a tourist destination. With lingering questions about the building’s future and a feeling that Wunderman’s memory was slipping away despite his contribution to the city, the family revived its efforts.
“Things weren’t moving,” Tomlin said. “And Chloë picked up the sword.”
‘Girl, Are You for Serious?’
Cassens was more than a “living doll” for her grandfather; she was a kindred spirit.
At 13, she got an Edie Sedgwick haircut and styled it with bangs. “My grandfather went wild,” she told a blogger in 2013. “Shortly after he passed, I realized why he was so taken with my appearance: I almost exactly resembled this piece by Fauvist artist Kees van Dongen which hung in Severin’s private office.”
Wunderman also gave her a nickname. If he was the “big scorpion” — a tough businessman who secured his licensing deal by shouting at Aldo Gucci — then she was the “little scorpion.”
“He would tell me that, in the desert, the smaller scorpions were more poisonous,” Cassens said, gesturing again to her jewelry.
“The strife between my family and Menton comes from the fact that it’s a city with many issues, and the museum isn’t a high priority,” Cassens said, walking along the city’s beach in a black trench coat, a valley girl at the height of her goth powers. “I am doing my best to be the scorpion in their shoes,” she said, “the scorpion under their pillows.”
But as she made these declarations of power, her voice often quivered.
She was still uneasy about taking control, even if years of trying to gently persuade Menton officials to make progress had failed. Previous visits to the city had ended in stalemates and distractions.
In December 2024, her legal team sent a letter demanding that Menton respect its contract and allocate a permanent home for the collection. Then she learned that the city was allocating $5.9 million toward the renovation of a different museum, the Palais de l’Europe, where a quickly arranged exhibition of Cocteau artworks from the Wunderman collection would be staged in April 2025.
Cassens went to that show undercover. She dressed in bright colors rather than her usual black, pinned back her bangs and wore large sunglasses. Should anyone ask who she was, she planned to give them an alias: Helen America. (Nobody did.) She took photographs of the exhibition that might demonstrate neglect.
“It showed a lack of prioritization,” Cassens said, adding, “My family has offered to help raise the money, but we were told that is not how it’s done in France, where museums are largely state-run.”
Her adventure raised eyebrows at home; friends and family wanted to know why she was going to such extraordinary lengths to prove her point. “Even my lawyers have asked, “Girl, are you for serious?’”
She was. The resources of her family fortune allowed her to keep pressing the local government. In July, her lawyers sent a formal notice to the mayor demanding the cancellation of the donation and the return of the artworks. The city’s lawyer, Fabrice Barbaro, responded in a public statement saying that the city was fulfilling its commitment by presenting Cocteau exhibitions across town. Cassens felt that the answer lacked substance and filed her lawsuit in a French court in January.
On her recent visit to Menton, Cassens grew increasingly frustrated by the site of the ruined museum. She pointed to rotted wood decking around its exterior and rust forming inside the galleries.
At a nearby cafe, scraping the burned sugar off her crème brûlée, she was pessimistic about the future of the museum. She said it clearly needed a renovation to raise the building and protect it from future floods. That would take more time and money.
“And as time goes on,” she said, “I’m concerned that when it finally reopens, nobody will remember to visit.”
A Visionary’s Blind Spots
Theulière, the museum director, emphasized that Menton has a relatively modest culture budget: about $1 million to run the city’s museums, libraries and other services. Inside the prehistory museum, employees sat together in a loft studying modern artworks and the recently unearthed bones of medieval residents. It was a small team that could also use financial support.
But for years the focus has been on restoring the damaged Cocteau artworks, gathering conservators from across Europe to repair drawings on paper that were drenched in saltwater. Theulière also described a long-term plan to transform the nearby Palais Carnolés — a former summer residence for royalty — into a centralized museum by 2028 with a gallery dedicated to the Wunderman collection. It could be used in the event that the seafront museum is never repaired.
Restoring the museum on the shoreline is still a municipal goal, although the city’s own legal fight with the insurance company SMACL was ongoing.
“We have no intention of fighting with the Wunderman Foundation or the heirs,” Mayor Juhel told Le Monde last year. “We are also impatient,” he added. “We want nothing more than to start the work. But we have no control over the legal system or the French administration.”
Theulière worried that another lawsuit would further delay things. “Now we have to talk through lawyers,” he said. The museum director recently announced that he would be leaving Menton for another job at the New National Museum of Monaco, leaving future leadership of the Cocteau museum in doubt.
Some legal experts in France think that Cassens will have an uphill battle in reclaiming her grandfather’s donation because the city has made efforts to display part of the collection. “The municipality of Menton can put forward good arguments to show that although circumstances beyond its control prevent it from implementing the donation literally, it is actively striving to act in accordance with the donor’s intentions,” said Remi Sermier, a French lawyer who is not involved in the case.
Cassens hopes that the efforts she has made to prove that Menton has violated its agreement with her grandfather will hold up in court.
“You need to be a little bit crazy to get things done,” she said.
Cocteau’s films and plays often revolve around characters that are conduits for the surreal and who find themselves beholden to a higher calling. Cassens had cast herself in such a role, but, like most visionaries, she was focused more on the big picture than some of the granular details of the story unfolding around her.
She hadn’t considered how the lawsuit might come at the expense of other cultural programming in Menton. She hadn’t spoken to the architect, whose opposition to changing the seaside museum’s design could make insuring the collection impossible at the original site. And she hadn’t worked out what to do with the artworks if she is successful in court.
During our last conversation, she said that it was important for her to use her family’s privilege in service of artists like Cocteau. But she acknowledged some vulnerability, pointing out that even scorpions have a soft underbelly. Their pincers are merely a defense mechanism.
Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology.
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