With “Jean Hugo, between heaven and earth”, the Paul-Valéry museum in Sète opens the third part of a major regional retrospective devoted to this leading artist of the 20th century.
It is relatively rare for an artist to be the subject of such a comprehensive retrospective. With the opening this Friday evening of the Sète section of the exhibition dedicated to Jean Hugo, three institutions, the Fabre museum in Montpellier, the Médard museum in Lunel and the Paul Valéry museum in Sète, are paying tribute to the painter’s work. , great-grandson of the illustrious writer. “Jean Hugo, between heaven and earth”as the Sète proposal is titled, focuses on the question of nature and landscape which animated the artist during the post-war period.
Nature intime
It opens very aptly with a set of paintings entitled The bearers of landscapes. Four works representing young peasant women, each carrying a very particular panorama on their heads and themselves anchored in a refined setting where the sky sometimes merges with their clothes. A stylized burden or, conversely, an offering to the viewer, this strange baggage can also recall the role of peasants who tirelessly shape landscapes and carry them, in a certain way, at arm’s length. A mise en abyme which allows us to glimpse the deeply intimate relationship that Jean Hugo had with nature and its beauties.
Exoticism
With more than a hundred works divided into seven sections, the exhibition, although abundant, nonetheless remains readable. Less invasive than in the Montpellier exhibition, the scenography by Maud Martinot consists of arches in a neo-Renaissance style on which flat areas of color have been affixed. We will perhaps regret the bias of having organized the themes geographically (Languedoc room, Côte d’Azur Spain room, Brittany room, England room, etc.) which, if it has the merit of clarity, suffers from a didacticism that was a little too basic. Throughout the rooms, we follow the wanderings of the artist which lead him to represent landscapes of countries where he has never set foot.
This is what we discover in this surprising room “Distant Horizons”, where the painter gives free rein to his imagination and creates, with all the ethnocentrism of the time, colorful canvases which give pride of place to figures. exotic. However, we are already in 1966, four years after the independence of Algeria, and these representations say a lot about the state of mind of the time, where the myth of the lost paradise and that of the noble savage, its corollary , continue to permeate the imagination of Western artists.
Unlearning
In Hugo, this state of mind is coupled with an aesthetic naivety directly inspired by Le Douanier Rousseau, to whom the artist felt particularly close. Here we touch on a key notion for understanding the trajectory of the painter who, after having lived in Parisian society alongside Cocteau and Picasso, settled at the Mas de Fourques, in Lunel, where he gradually engaged in a process of “unlearning”.
A term that seems surprising applied to a person who, let us remember, has no academic training, but which illustrates well the path taken by the artist who tends to approach a form “of original innocence” in the line of pictorial romanticism. A skillfully constructed innocence, as Pierre Wat writes in his work Innocence Regained – The Landscape According to Jean Hugo, which permeates all the works shown at the Paul-Valéry museum.
