A resounding event is taking place around the artist Jean Hugo: a triple exhibition in the Hérault region. The Médard museum in Lunel will host In all intimacy: Jean Hugo and Lunelfrom June 19 to September 22, the Fabre museum in Montpellier Jean Hugo, the magical lookfrom June 28 to October 13, and the Paul Valéry museum in Sète Jean Hugo, between heaven and earth, from June 29 to October 13. Each of these museums has appropriated a part of the artist’s history, thus offering three independent and complementary museum tours.
Finally our region recognizes the value and importance of an extraordinary artist who will have marked his century and could well give grist to the mill of the next. How can we interpret, in fact, his immoderate taste for walking in landscapes such as we no longer see, that progress has damaged or made disappear forever? These walks around Lunel, one per day, in concentric circles, will be discussed at the Médard museum which gives us a Jean Hugo In all intimacy, his life at Mas de Fourques, from the 1930s to his death in 1984, visits from friends, his taste for beautiful books, documents, letters and objects, sketches and palettes. The landscape will be celebrated at the Paul Valéry Museum, Between earth and sky, around a hundred works and many illustrated books. The temporary rooms of the Fabre museum will familiarize us with The Magic Look of this painter who collaborated extensively, as a decorator, on theatre and film productions (Joan of Arc, by Dreyer). How can we approach this work that spans seven decades, marked by a desire to simplify painting, a demand for purity and a refined, almost goldsmith’s taste for small formats? Intimacy rather than the presumptions of the grandiose. And how can we designate it? One of his most narrative paintings, The imposter is called post-impressionism, The White Room fawn, The metamorphoses or St-Valentin surrealism, Table of cubism game… Finally, The three horses, Ste-Anne, and Hyères Bay... in a naive style, inspired by his interest in Italian primitivism. Restrictive categories are not very suitable for singular and free creators. But if he had to choose, it was the so-called naive art that suited him best. He favored simplified form, but on closer inspection, his way of treating volumes, the juxtaposition of colored planes, and of course the perspective, are resolutely modern. Jean Hugo knew how to capture the essence of a landscape, a situation or a custom and give it a universal scope by eliminating the accessory, and by treating the image in a two-dimensional way. The southern light corresponded to his thirst for spirituality and confidence that can be guessed in the clarity and serenity emerging from his paintings. His primitivism was learned, in some way a counterpoint to the currents of his time. Today, we need more discreet lessons from this type of nature lover, before it becomes a cliché, than from thunderous and obvious lesson-givers, leading their peers down the path of historical error while the present is there, just waiting to be picked. This is what this artist, whom our era would do well to (re)discover, did all his life, without depriving himself of illustrious contacts, and without leaving public life. These three exhibitions, which bring together three museums, and not the least, could contribute to this.
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For more information: museemedard.fr; museefabre.fr; museepaulvalery-sete.fr
