Charles Hug

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Charles Hug , originally Karl Hug (born June 22, 1899 in St. Gallen ; † May 7, 1979 in Zurich ), was a Swiss painter , draftsman and book illustrator .

life and work

Childhood and Adolescence (1899–1923)

Karl Hug spent childhood and youth in St. Gallen with his two younger brothers Jakob and Adolf, where his parents ran the Gasthaus Zum Zeughaus . The father, Karl Alois Hug, was originally a typesetter and after years in Northern Germany had taken over the parents' inn. The smoky dining room is what his biographer Alfred Schüler calls "the first school of observation for Hug the eye-catcher". After finishing school, he had to begin an apprenticeship as a machine-maker in a printing company, which he broke off after a year. He earned his living as a construction worker and attended evening classes at the St. Gallen trade school, first in the structural engineering department and later in the decorative department. During this time, the first drawings, sketches of guests from the armory , portraits and self-portraits were made. From 1920, after graduating from the recruiting school in Monte Ceneri , Hug worked as a font painter in Geneva.

Berlin Paris Berlin (1923-1926)

In 1923 Hug moved to Berlin and attended evening courses in the private school of the Berlin painter and sculptor Arthur Lewin-Funcke (Lewin-Funcke School) and in the Berlin Lessing University . Artistically he felt drawn to the teachers there Käthe Kollwitz and Max Liebermann , who supported him with letters of recommendation, but also to Karl Walser and Lovis Corinth . Grosz , Dix , and the Dadaists around Schwitters remained a stranger to him . Seriously ill, he returned to St. Gallen in 1925 and, having recovered, gratefully accepted Oskar Reinhart's scholarship for a one-time stay in Paris that same year. He worked as a dishwasher, assistant mechanic, fur sorter and advertising painter in order to be able to stay longer in Paris. Hug swam in the current, overwhelmed, absorbed everything: museums, theaters, the art scene. With his experience in Paris, he traveled to Berlin again in the same year, worked as a press illustrator and reporter for the cultural magazine Der Cross-Section and Bruno Cassirer's Art and Artists and thus had the opportunity to visit theaters and variety shows in front of and behind the stage. He drew, sketched and made his first lithographs, and he was able to take part in group exhibitions. Hug joined the circles around Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, Slevogt , Orlik , Karl Scheffler , Meier-Graefe , Flechtheim and Glaser . He stayed until 1926: "Liebermann, Käthe Kollwitz, Curt Glaser bought from my sketches and drawings, and again a carriage ride through the zoo, dinner in the oyster bar, and I left the city on the Spree". The hectic press work had brought Hug to the verge of a nervous breakdown, so he followed the advice of his friends and moved to Paris.

Paris (1926–1933)

Right at the beginning of his second stay in Paris, he rented a small studio, and from then on he called himself Charles Hug. He decided to become an artist, even if he had to do other jobs for a living. And the draftsman Hug discovered painting for himself. He studied at the Louvre Goya , van Gogh , Cézanne , Velázquez , Vermeer , met Cocteau , Picasso , Segonzac , Matisse and made friends with artist colleagues Max Gubler , Carl Roesch , Varlin and Meret Oppenheim . Hug drew and painted numerous artists and clowns from the environment of the Cirque Medrano , and he also portrayed Kiki de Montparnasse .

With his partner Amrey Balsiger (1909–1999), the daughter of Mentona Mosers , Hug first went to Arles for some time in 1927 , where he worked with Max Hunziker and, above all, artistically implemented the experiences of bullfighting. From there they traveled to Tunis , Susa , Sfax and Kairuan for a year . There he portrayed Bedouin women, dervishes, painted wedding ceremonies and discovered for himself the “landscape that he had not seen before”. He returned briefly to Zurich in 1928, where he was noticed by the director of the Kunsthaus Zurich, who immediately integrated him in a prominent way in a group exhibition of young Swiss painters. Back in Paris, numerous portraits were commissioned, nudes, self-portraits, other clown pictures, pictures of horse races. He found no access to the then modern style of cubism, surrealism or abstract painting. The art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler wanted to sign him after he discovered him in 1930 in the Exposition de Portraits . But Charles Hug declined with the comment: "Je ne vois pas les yeux de ma mère au carré."

The representational pictures that were created during the Parisian period are today often assigned to his silver- gray period , a kind of monochrome gray-scale painting. Hug became better known and, thanks to successful exhibitions, was able to make a living from his artistic profession. The collector Henri-Pierre Roché also acquired his pictures "because Hug was as independent in this phase as Picasso in the Temps bleu ". Many of his clown pictures appeared in Vogue magazine .

Like many other artists of the time, Hug was also interested in artistic products from Black Africa : from 1929 to 1932 he auctioned and bought numerous masks by the Wè and Dan from the region of today's Ivory Coast . (Most of them are now a donation from the estate in the Zurich Museum Rietberg .)

Charles Hug and Amrey Balsiger separated in 1931 after they had met the German-Dutch painter Herbert Fiedler (1891–1962), whom she married in 1938.

Switzerland (1934–1979)

Hug made the acquaintance of the St. Gallen violinist Renée-Elisabeth Walz (1909–1979) in 1932 and had an intensive correspondence with her. In 1934 he returned to Switzerland. After getting married in the same year, they took up residence in Zurich in winter and in Greifenstein- Staad near Rorschach in summer , an old farmhouse with a large garden and a view of Lake Constance . He continued to take part in international exhibitions (Brussels, Tokyo, Paris) with his drawings, portraits and landscapes, but now concentrated his work on fruit and flower still lifes and landscapes and devoted himself more to his drawing and illustrative work. For his illustrations for Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's Der Schuß von der Kanzel and Gottfried Keller's Der Landvogt von Greifensee , he received awards from the Gottfried Keller and CF Meyer Foundation in 1938 and 1939.

During the Second World War , Hug was a simple gunner in active service in the Swiss Army until 1942 , then he was an army reporter at the press office of the army staff until the end of the war. Many of his reports were published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung . At the same time and in secret he kept a graphic war diary, which he did not release for publication until 1979, shortly before his death. His foreword to the book edition reads: “The war raged around our country / In the east in the west / In the south in the north / Cities and villages were bombed / Refugees wounded and dead lined the path of suffering / I had many friends and life encounters in the countries / Those struck by fate hardly speak / So the drawings were created out of compassion / Without commission or the thought of a publication / A memorial to the future ”. In addition, in 1944 he was commissioned to design advertising posters for the Swiss donation and in 1945 to design seven wall paintings for the touring exhibition The Prisoners of War of the International Committee of the Red Cross .

After the war Charles and Renée Hug went on numerous trips (Arles, Egypt, New York, Amsterdam, London), which inspired his work as much as the summer stays in Greifenstein. The cityscapes, landscapes, portraits, still lifes and garden pictures testify to his artistic will to perfect what was once properly recognized. The friends Silvia and Ernst Schegg characterize his art: “There are not many examples in art history where a garden landscape is placed in the center of art in this comprehensive sense. Most likely the water lily pictures by Monet, where becoming, being, blooming and floating also become a life metaphor and an object of composition. ... With countless nervous brushstrokes, often almost violent brush strokes, layer by layer he applied the paint to the white canvas and composed with a sea of ​​colors what he captured as an inner image. Seen up close, its painterly texture is strongly expressive, with an extremely nuanced palette. As a whole picture, however, composition and color combine to create a supposedly impressionistic impression - in fact they turn out to be a characteristic, individual picture architecture that also has abstract features. "

In the last decades of his life, Charles Hug also took on more and more commissions to illustrate literary works: almost 50 books with appropriate illustrations testify to his intensive examination of the works of Flaubert, Keller, Meyer, Episthenes, Walser, Maupassant, Zola and numerous other writers.

The day before the opening of his first major retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zürich, which he was still able to help shape, Charles Hug died of a stroke and his wife died three months later. The farmhouse studio in Greifenstein was redesigned by the estate administrators into a Charles Hug house museum and was open to the public until 2002.

Works

  • Cirque , suite of six drypoint etchings, Edition aux Quatre-Chemins, Paris 1929
  • Advertising posters for the Swiss donation , 1944/1945
  • The Prisoner of War , seven murals for a traveling exhibition of the International Committee of the Red Cross , Geneva 1945
  • Nine-part fresco for the chapel of the cantonal hospital Walenstadt , 1960/1961
  • Corrida , portfolio with 22 original lithographs, 1963
  • 1939-1945. 41 drawings , Edition Chroma, Montreux 1979, ISBN 3-7173-0009-1
  • Portraits - 28 selected drawings 1920–1975 , Edition Chroma, Montreux 1983
  • Circus people - 60 selected drawings , with a foreword by Dimitri , Edition Chroma, Montreux 1985

Works by Charles Hug are represented in these collections, among others: Kunsthalle Basel , Kunstmuseum St. Gallen , Kunsthaus Zurich , graphic collection of the ETH Zurich .

Illustrated books (selection)

  • Conrad Ferdinand Meyer: The shot from the pulpit , Zurich 1938
  • Albin Zollinger : Poems , Zurich 1938
  • Bernhard Diebold : Italian Suite , Zurich 1939
  • Gustave Flaubert : Madame Bovary , Zurich 1939
  • Gottfried Keller: The Governor of Greifensee , Zurich 1939
  • Episthenes : The poems of Episthenes , Zurich 1949
  • Max Frisch : Leaves from the bread sack , Zurich 1940
  • Gottfried Keller: The Diary and the Dream Book , Basel 1942
  • Robert Walser : On the happiness of misfortune and poverty , Basel 1944
  • Gustave Flaubert: The School of Sensibility , Zurich 1946
  • Guy de Maupassant : Contes choisis , Zurich 1947
  • Gottfried Keller: Seven Legends , Zurich 1951
  • Thornton Wilder : The Bridge of San Luis Rey , Zurich 1951
  • Antoine-François Prévost : Manon Lescaut , Zurich 1952
  • Guy de Maupassant: Whims of Fate , Zurich 1956
  • Albin Zollinger: The Russian Horses and Other Stories , Basel 1960
  • Alphonse Daudet : Sappho. A Parisian moral picture , Zurich 1961
  • Emanuel Stickelberger : Hans Waldmann's last days. An episode from Swiss history , Zurich 1973
  • Michelangelo Buonarotti : Sonetti. Una scelta , Zurich 1973

Exhibitions

Awards

literature

  • Alfred pupil: Charles Hug. Painter, draftsman, illustrator , Artemis Verlag, Zurich 1959
  • Lorenz Homberger (Ed.): Masks of the Wè and Dan - Ivory Coast. The collection of the Swiss painter Charles Hug, Paris 1928–31 , exhibition catalog Museum Rietberg , Zurich 1997
  • Silvia and Ernst Schegg (eds.): So ... and here ... farewell to an artist's dream. One last visit to the Charles and Renée Hug House Museum , 2002
  • Judith Annaheim, Guido Baumgartner: Charles Hug - One stroke of the brush, one life . Catalog for the retrospective Valid; People in the work of Charles Hug in the museumbickel Walenstadt, Benteli Verlag, Sulgen, Bern, Zurich 2010, ISBN 978-3-7165-1646-1

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Alfred pupil: Charles Hug. Painter, draftsman, illustrator. Zurich 1959, p. 13.
  2. ↑ quoted from: Alfred Schüler: Charles Hug. Painter, draftsman, illustrator. Zurich 1959, p. 18.
  3. ^ Alfred pupil: Charles Hug. Painter, draftsman, illustrator. Zurich 1959, p. 20.
  4. ↑ “I don't see my mother's eyes as square.” Remembrance of the estate administrator Ernst Schegg quote. in: Judith Annaheim, Guido Baumgartner: Charles Hug - One brush stroke, one life . Zurich 2010, p. 14.
  5. ↑ So Denise Hug in Life Intensity and the Discovery of Color - The Years in Paris 1926–1933. In: Judith Annaheim, Guido Baumgartner: Charles Hug - One brush stroke, one life . Zurich 2010, pp. 23–24.
  6. ↑ Quoted from Alfred Schüler: Charles Hug. Painter, draftsman, illustrator. Zurich 1959, p. 24.
  7. ↑ 1939-1945. 41 drawings , Montreux 1979. Quoted from: Judith Annaheim, Guido Baumgartner: Charles Hug - One brush stroke, one life . Zurich 2010, p. 82.
  8. ↑ Ernst Schegg, Silvia Weder Schegg: Garden - Acker - Ackergarten , in: Judith Annaheim, Guido Baumgartner: Charles Hug - One brush stroke, one life . Zurich 2010, p. 121.
  9. ^ Exhibition directory of the Kunsthaus Zürich. (PDF file, 144 kB)
personal data
SURNAME Hug, Charles
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hug, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss painter and book illustrator
DATE OF BIRTH June 22, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Gallen
DATE OF DEATH May 7, 1979
Place of death Zurich