Luminous Jean Hugo exhibition
About the exhibition "Jean Hugo, le regard magique", visible at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier until October 13.
It's not so easy to be the great-grandson of Victor Hugo! Throughout his life, Jean Hugo (1894-1984) chose modesty, to the point that his friend Pablo Picasso reproached him for not having "taken enough care of his glory"... Not surprising from someone who took care of his own full-time. But not everyone is obliged to fall into excess. I admit that the discreet temperament of an artist makes him instinctively more sympathetic to me. Nevertheless, Jean Hugo could perhaps have found a middle ground. Because today, who really knows his work?
Personally, I didn’t know her well enough to go and see the exhibition currently dedicated to her at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, as part of a tribute season being held in the Hérault region on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of her death, with an exhibition also taking place at the Musée Paul-Valéry in Sète. Except that I was lucky: my route was passing through Montpellier this summer. And I never park my caravan there without going to the Musée Fabre, whatever temporary exhibition is on at the time.
It’s funny, when I read the name Jean Hugo, I immediately thought of his wife, the painter Valentine Hugo (1887-1968), known for her work with the Surrealists and the Ballets Russes. Hey, that must be Valentine Hugo’s husband, I thought to myself. For once that it was in that sense, I made myself smile. I confess: my daughter's name is Valentine, so for twenty-six years I have had a particular interest in all the artists with that name, and it is also probably because she was a friend of Jean Cocteau that I once heard of Valentine Hugo. After checking, it was indeed her, Valentine née Gross, who introduced Jean Hugo to the Parisian artistic world of the Roaring Twenties. And not the other way around.
Anyway. I happened to wander through the exhibition "Jean Hugo, the Magical Gaze", bringing together, in a museum that took the opportunity to add new acquisitions to its already substantial Hugo collection, more than 330 works of art, including many loans from French and foreign institutions, creating a dialogue between the artist's life and work from 1914 until the Second World War and his artistic friendships. I think I was all the more amazed because I had no expectations! As the magazine Connaissance des arts wrote in its summer issue, "the Fabre museum unfolds the great journey of the life and career of the painter and theater designer, mixed with the literary and artistic avant-garde of the time." So I can now say that it is a great success! Because we are far from the simple art gallery that would line up paintings for sale on its walls. Not only does the judicious museum tour allow us to meet a truly endearing character, but it also offers a gradual measure of the magnitude of a work that celebrates nature and the order of the world. Jean Hugo's place in the contemporary art of his time is indeed truly unique. Because spirituality inspired him as much as his artistic talent. He illustrated in particular the Imitation of Our Lord Jesus Christ, translated by Lamennais in 1946, and the Mystery of the Charity of Joan of Arc, by Charles Péguy, in 1951. We can also cite explicit paintings, such as Nathaniel under the fig tree, or the creation of cartoons for series of stained glass windows in various churches.
“One of his famous paintings shows the pilgrims of Emmaus: two walkers in a Provençal landscape. If you don’t have the title, it’s not obvious…”, explains Florian Michel, historian, professor at the University of Paris-I-Panthéon-Sorbonne, honorary member of the Association of Friends of Jean Hugo and vice-president of the Jacques and Raïssa Maritain Study Circle, who collaborated on the exhibition catalogue. “This is his way of living the Gospel in his Hérault where he lives. His art, through the representation of the garden, the vines, the trees, has something biblical that does not always bear the name. We find in Jean Hugo a certain exaltation of creation, but also of virtues, of harmony, of order and of a sense of working with nature in a proximity with reasoned agriculture, in reaction to an industrial and materialistic world. We are at the antipodes of the destructuring of the 20th century, both historically and in terms of art history. Jean Hugo shows a neat world where creation is received for what it is."
His grandmother having always forbidden access to the Catholic church to his entire family, Jean Hugo therefore decided to be baptized in 1931, after his marriage with Valentine began to fail, choosing from then on to lead an almost ascetic life at the Mas de Fourques, in Lunel (34). We understand better why he was not likely to worry about his glory like his buddy with the excessive ego...
One of his paintings entitled l'Imposteur also evokes this point: Jean Hugo saw himself for a long time as an impostor in the sense that he revolved around the Church, where he frequented it without being a full member. With baptism he felt reconciled with himself; That was the end of the imposture.
From then on I wanted to know everything about Jean Hugo. It turns out that the biographer Henri Gourdin wrote a book about him. Phew. There is no catalogue raisonné of Jean Hugo's drawings or paintings, and his archives have been dispersed. It therefore took many years of research for Henri Gourdin, author of several books on the Hugo saga, to draw a fair portrait of the artist. And we discover, or rediscover, that with his wife Valentine, Jean knew the artistic and literary elite of Paris in the 1920s, frequenting Cocteau and Éluard, Picasso and Brancusi, Satie and Ravel… It was through this that his career took off: in less than ten years, he designed the sets and costumes for around twenty plays and ballets, he illustrated the novels and poems of his writer friends and he painted decorative panels for personalities such as the Princess of Faucigny-Lucinge. Tired of this worldly life and touched by the Christian faith, he retired in 1930 to his house in the Camargue, where he continued to paint and began creating stained glass windows… the subject of a second book by the same author.
Article written by Valibri en Roulotte
Photo caption for illustration: Jean HUGO, Les Métamorphoses (detail), 1929, tempera on canvas, 32.5 x 53.8 cm, private collection. ©Musée Fabre de Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole, photography: Frédéric Jaulmes. ©Adagp, Paris, 2024