Valentine Hugo

Valentine Hugo , née Valentine Marie Augustine Gross , (born March 16, 1887 in Boulogne-sur-Mer , † March 16, 1968 in Paris ) was a French painter, illustrator, costume designer and author, at times associated with the surrealist movement .

life and work

Jeux, stage scenes
Valentine Hugo , 1912
pastel
George Chaffée Collection, Harvard University , Cambridge Link to the picture (please note copyrights )

Valentine Gross was the daughter of the musician Auguste Gross and his wife Zèlie Dèmelin. She became interested in art, music and theater from an early age. From 1907 to 1910 she studied art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In May 1909 she saw the Ballets Russes at their first performance at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris , which inspired her to create stage scenes. In 1913, the Montaigne Gallery showed its ballet sketches in the foyer of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées on the occasion of the controversial premiere of Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps . In the same year she met well-known French artists such as Roger de la Fresnaye , Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau . In 1917 she met her future husband, the painter Jean Hugo (1894–1984), a great-grandson of Victor Hugo . The marriage took place in 1919 with Cocteau and Satie as witnesses. The couple ran a drawing room in their apartment in the Palais Royal . In 1921 she and her husband designed the costumes for Mariés de la Tour Eiffel by Cocteau. Again for Cocteau, they designed the costumes for Roméo et Juliette in 1924 .

In 1926, Valentine Hugo met the surrealist poet Paul Éluard . She was the first artist to illustrate his work. Their friendship lasted until his death in 1952. A year later she worked as a costume designer for the film La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc . Her husband Jean Hugo was never interested in the surrealist movement, they drifted apart. The separation took place in 1929 - the year of her liaison with Éluard - and the divorce in 1932. However, they remained on friendly terms until their death.

Les Surréalistes (Éluard, Breton, Tzara, Crevel and Char)
Valentine Hugo , 1932-1948
Oil on canvas
120 × 100 cm
Privately owned Link to the picture (please note copyrights )

She had an affair with André Breton , the self-proclaimed leader of the Surrealists, from August 1930 to October 1932 and during this time she met other Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dali , Max Ernst , Georges Hugnet , René Char and Tristan Tzara , some of whom she also knew portrayed. She took part in surrealist group experiments, Cadavre Exquis , including a painting entitled Landscape , which was written around 1933 together with Breton, Tzara and his wife Greta Knutson (1899–1983) . Her passion for the surrealist movement lasted until 1937. Her distance took place after the suicide of René Crevel in 1935 and the beginning of the retreat from the movement of René Char, Tristan Tzara and Paul Éluard. During the Second World War , she worked for the radio station Radio-Mondial for a short time in early 1940, and continued this work in the 1950s and 1960s. Furthermore, she was active in painting and created book illustrations .

In her last years Valentine Hugo lived lonely and in financial difficulties in Paris. By the time she died in 1968, many of her friends had already died. She is one of the more forgotten surrealist artists, but the art market began to show interest in her in the recent past. In 2000 a key work of hers reached a price of 1.9 million francs at auction.

Her estate with numerous documents and works of art, most of which were donated or acquired by the American journalist and curator Carlton Lake (1915-2006), is in the Carlton Lake Collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin .

Exhibitions

Valentine Hugo was one of the first women to be represented at the 1933 surrealist exhibition at the Pierre Colle Gallery in Paris and at the Salon des Surindépendants. Museum director Alfred Barr included three works by Hugo in his exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936 , including Rêve du 17 janvier 1934 from 1934. In 1943 Hugo took part in the exhibition “Exhibition by 31 Women ”in Peggy Guggenheim's New York gallery Art of This Century . This exhibition was initiated by Marcel Duchamp . In 1977 the Center culturel de Champagne in Troyes dedicated her first retrospective posthumously in France.

Actress in film and theater

Valentine Hugo starred in the following film together with other artists such as Max Ernst , Josep Llorens i Artigas and Roland Penrose : L'Âge d'Or from 1930, directed by Luis Buñuel .

Under the influence of the German occupation of Paris, Pablo Picasso's play Le Désir attrapé par la queue (How to grab wishes by the tail) was created in just a few days in 1941 , first published in Message magazine and directed by Albert Camus in March 1944 in the apartment of Michel Leiris with the participation of artists and writers such as Simone de Beauvoir , Jean-Paul Sartre , Raymond Queneau , Dora Maar and Valentine Hugo. It premiered in 1950 at London's Watergate Theater.

Work (selection)

painting

• Rêve du December 21 , 1929
• La Barque de l'amour s'est brisée contre la vie courante , 1930
• Les amants de Paris (Portrait de Valentine Hugo et André Breton) , around 1930 (Fig.)
• Une femme admirable apparaîtra sur un zèbre , 1932
• La Vérité tomberait du ciel sous la forme d'un harfang , 1932
• Rêve du 17 janvier 1934 , 1934
• Les Surréalistes , 1932–1948 (portraits of André Breton, René Crevel , René Char, Paul Éluard and Tristan Tzara), private collection
• Portrait de Pablo Picasso , 1934–1948, Center Pompidou (ill.)
• En souvenir du muscari , 1937, private collection (ill.)

Book illustrations

• Comte de Lautréamont : Chants de Maldoror , 1933
• Achim d'Arnim : Contes bizarres , éditions de Cahiers Libres, 1933
• René Laporte: Alphabet de l'amour , éditions GLM, 1935
• René Char : Placard pour un chemin des écoliers , éditions GLM, 1937
• Paul Éluard : Les Animaux et leurs hommes, Les Hommes et leurs animaux , Gallimard, Paris 1937
• Arthur Rimbaud : Les Poètes de sept ans , éditions GLM, 1939
• Madeleine Legrand: À Fresnes , témoignage précédé d'un poème de Paul Eluard, Éditions Stock, 1944
• Les aventures de fido Caniche. Guy Le Prat, Paris 1947
• Tristan L'Hermite : Le promenoir des deux amants , éditions GLM, 1949
• Jacques de Lacretelle : Silbermann , éditions André Sauret, 1950
• Paul Éluard: Le phénix , éditions GLM, 1951
• Laurice Schehadé: Le temps est un voleur d'images , éditions GLM, 1952
• 12 commandements pour tous les temps et pour personne , éditions GLM, 1955

Publications

• Mouvements de danse de l'antiquité à nos jours. M. de Brunoff, Paris 1914
• Tributes to Brancusi. Cahiers d'Art , Paris, issue 30, 1955, p. 241 f.
• En 1918 et 1919, Raymond Radiguet cherche le chemin de la poésie. In: Actualité litteraire , No. 55, March 1959
• Béatrice Seguin (ed.): Valentine Hugo: écrits et entretiens radiophoniques , Actes Sud, 2002

literature

• Adam Biro & René Passeron: Dictionnaire général du surréalisme et de ses environs , Office du livre & Presses universitaires de France, 1982, p. 210
• Anne de Margerie: Valentine Hugo, 1887–1968. J. Damase, Paris 1983
• Cathy Bernheim: Valentine Hugo. Presses de la Renaissance, Paris 1990
• Carlton Lake : Confessions of a literary archaeologist . New Directions. New York 1990, ISBN 0-8112-1130-4 (p. 90 f online)
• Georgiana Colvile: Scandaleusement d'elles. Trente-quatre femmes surréalistes , Jean-Michel Place, Paris 1999, p. 132 ff.
• Jean Pierre Cauvin: Valentine Hugo et le surréalisme . In Béatrice Seguin: Valentine Hugo: écrits et entretiens radiophoniques , Actes Sud, 2002

Web links

• Valentine Hugo: An Inventory of Her Papers in the Carlton Lake Collection , Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin (English)
• Valentine Hugo on geneanet.org
• Valentine Hugo on artnet

Individual evidence

1. ↑ La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc , filmreference.com, accessed December 27, 2014
2. ↑ Fig. , Moma.org, accessed December 28, 2014
3. ↑ Quoted from the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center web link
4. ↑ Quoted after the web link geneanet.org
5. ^ Judith Benhamou-Huet, Mystérieuse Valentine Hugo, Les Échos , No. 19608, February 17, 2006 ( online) .
6. ↑ Quoted from the Carlton Lake Collection web link
7. ↑ Valentine Hugo ( Memento of December 28, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), wiw.net, accessed on December 28, 2014
8. ↑ The golden age . IMDb. Retrieved December 7, 2014.
9. ↑ sogar.ch: How to be desired by the tail grabs ( Memento of December 25, 2014 Internet Archive )
10. ^ Matt Trueman: Picasso's surreal play comes to New York , theguardian, com, October 3, 2012, accessed December 29, 2014