Friend of Picasso and Cocteau, in 1929 he left the noise and frivolity of artistic Paris for a life marked by faith and the Languedoc landscapes. He died at age 89 in 1984. Three exhibitions are dedicated to him this summer.
Jean Hugo died 40 years ago, on his lands of Mas de Fourques, in Lunel. To review his life would be like leafing through the pages of Who’s Who. His great-grandfather, Victor Hugo, was a monster of French literature and politics. His friends also left their mark on history, from Picasso to Cocteau.
Fabre Museum/ADAGP
Jean Hugo, a talented painter and decorator, was overshadowed by his ancestor and his relatives. “You don’t care enough about your glory!” Picasso had told him. Humble, he did not have “the obsessive thirst” for recognition “that drove Victor Hugo”, assures biographer Henri Gourdin. And yet, his work and his life deserve much better than the mention “great-grandson of…” or friend of celebrities. The museums of Montpellier, Sète and Lunel are taking it upon themselves to do him justice this summer.
To discover in Montpellier, Sète and Lunel
The museums of Montpellier, Sète and Lunel have tuned their violins for the fortieth anniversary of the death of Jean Hugo and it is very good.
The Fabre museum, from this Friday until October 13, takes you in the footsteps of the painter and decorator Jean Hugo up to the Second World War.
The Paul-Valéry museum, from this Saturday and also until October 13, is offering a chronological section after the 1940s.
Finally, the Médard museum is evoking “His life in Lunel” from 1920 to 1984, from June 19 to September 22.
Note that the Fabre Museum, which organized a Hugo retrospective in 1995, has fifty works by the artist.
He was four years old when his parents separated. He lives with his mother, Pauline. At the age of 20, he spent the First World War in the mud, without parting with his sketchbook which marked his pictorial debut. In 1918, he left the “banter of our officers’ tables” for political lunches and the brilliant minds of the friends of his maternal grandmother, Aline Menard-Dorian.
She and her husband, an industrialist who had long been a deputy for Hérault, received Proust and Clemenceau in their Parisian mansion.
CC BY SA
Their daughter Pauline, married in turn to two painters, Georges Hugo then René Hermann-Paul, also held salons, inviting Picasso, Cocteau, Max Jacob, Erik Satie.
Cendrars, Jouvet, Dreyer, Chanel, Colette…
Jean met Valentine Gross in 1917, by chance on military leave. She is a painter. They married in 1919. Satie and Cocteau were Valentine’s witnesses. His witnesses are Albert Thomas (Minister of Armaments during the First War) and André Mater (lawyer, publicist and republican activist).
Fabre Museum
The couple frequented Cendrars, Colette, Jouvet, Dreyer, Chanel, Ernst, Stravinsky. It was the time of the avant-garde, of society balls, of the Roaring Twenties. It was “the time of the Zugos”, joked Cocteau, to speak of the young couple in the spotlight. The poet and playwright commissioned Jean to design sets and costumes for his plays. Charles Dullin did the same. Carl Dreyer ditto, for the silent film “The Passion of Joan of Arc”.
He turns to Catholicism
The couple was struggling. They divorced in 1932, but Jean Hugo had been changing since the early 1920s. He had turned to religion, going against the grain of his family’s heritage. In 1923, in Montpellier, after a foot injury, a hospital intern showed him the way. Very pious, he took him to visit the Enclos Saint-François. It was there that he was baptized in 1931.
A few months after the death of his grandmother Aline (in 1929), he moved to the Fourques farmhouse, the family property, which he inherited. “Parishe wrote, was only interested in his own fauna, in their devouring more ferocious than that of praying mantises.”
At a Parisian dinner, he tries to convince Paul Morand of the beauty of the roller, the black bulls of the Camargue and the immaculate egrets. “You see he’s not listening to you, writes Marie Rouanet in her book Murmures for Jean Hugo. Only Paris interests him, like everyone else, gossip […]. You will be silent from now on. »
Seven late children
Hugo is 35 years old. He doesn’t cut himself off from the world, however. “You welcome homeless people, strange crazy people, strays, animals that we no longer want or can no longer keep“, wrote Marie Rouanet in an address to Jean Hugo.
Euphrosine Munster, a Russian emigrant, supports Jean Hugo. It is she who, in London, meets a young woman who tells him that she would like to come to France.and know artists“. “Go to Fourques”she answers him. “She came there, writes Jean Hugo in his autobiography, The Look of Memory. I fell in love with her. I married her; we were happy and had many children.” Seven, five girls and two boys, all still alive. Four of them are linked to artistic practices.
Lauretta Hope-Nicholson and Jean Hugo married in 1949. She was thirty. He was 55. She protected him, kept him from worries and intruders. But the Thebaid of Fourques was not completely watertight. The world worried Hugo.
“We must enter the time of the angels”
He no longer recognizes the Catholic Church he loved, he resents it for having abandoned Latin. He no longer finds the coastline and the hinterland of his childhood, ravaged by urbanization. He, the ecologist before his time, the winemaker, sees pesticides eradicating wild flora. The noise is getting closer. The noose is tightening. He worries about what he is leaving as a legacy.
CC BY SA
“He had a question about his salvation“, says the Montpellier painter Vincent Bioulès, his friend, in the catalogue of the Hugo exhibition at the Fabre museum. Bioulès replies that he has “does good to people” with his paintings. “We must enter the time of the angels“, Jean Hugo told him a few days before dying, on June 21, 1984, at the age of 89.
Jean Hugo Fund
In Lunel, Proust’s childhood madeleines
Jean Hugo had lost nothing of his childhood Proust Madeleines in Lunel. It retained both the scent of Marsillargues fougasse and “the smell of polish to clean furniture“; the memory of the triple gauze curtain to prevent flies from entering the house and the anger of his grandmother if they did not; the anti-mosquito veils with which he was wrapped when walking in the scrubland; the “car donkey” which led to neighboring villages.
He also remembered the farm party after the harvest: “Dressed as a matador, I stabbed a cardboard bull“. In the evening, the assembly enjoyed the music of the Catalan Casals family… In its ranks, on the cello, a certain Pablo, “not yet famous, but already bald”.
Young Hugo meets Frédéric Mistral through his grandmother and discovers the world of felibres. Later, he sympathized with the Marquis de Baroncelli: “He came to Fourques on his white horse and offered me a copy of his Provençal poems.“The famous manadier, inventor of the Camargue spirit with the false air of Buffalo Bill, also welcomed him into his farmhouse.”He was the king of this country […]a poor king […]he had nothing left but his estate and debts“.
Jean Hugo also loves Montpellier: “The great abalone of Peyrou still lived […]the old men felt young around him”he writes in his memoirs. “In the botanical gardens, the concierge would chase away lovers who lingered in the groves with her whip.”
It is the South as a whole that charms the artist, nourished by the variety of the Languedoc landscape, from the seaside to the Camargue, to the plain, to the hills, to the Pic Saint-Loup, to the Cévennes.His paintings are located outside of time.“, insists the painter Vincent Bioulès. And what does it matter if his opponents found his painting “too easy” and his pictures too “naive“, summarizes Marie Rouanet.
He worked in the workshop that his grandparents had built for their painter son-in-law. “He had only painted two pastels, a view of the village of Gallargues and some sad olive trees because he liked neither the countryside nor the South of France“, writes Jean Hugo in “The gaze of memory”.
His studio was “a tiny hermitage of silence among the trees,” recalls Marie Rouanet.He went there around 10 a.m. and it was a continuous day, he only came back at the end of the afternoon when evening fell because he painted in daylight“, says Léopoldine, one of his daughters.
The other ritual was religious: he went to Lunel every morning, for the first mass at 7 o’clock.
In the 1930s and 1940s, he went for a daily walk: he had traced a five-kilometre radius around Fourques, divided into seven parts, one per day. A Jean Hugo path project, led by his son Jean-Baptiste, could soon see the light of day.
In the summer, with his family, he left Lunel and its intense heat to find coolness in Aveyron, in Nant, below the Causse du Larzac. The Rogez farmhouse, in the Durzon valley, was home to the Hugo family. Very attached to Nant and its church, he designed the designs for the three stained glass windows of the abbey church.
