Tag: Erik Satie

UNDER THE VOLCANO

A name sometimes marks a life. The name Victor Hugo carries so much. Weight that his descendants have no alternative but to live under the crushing importance of their ancestor, either accepting. That nothing they will achieve or think will compare, or. Trying rebelliously to emulate his achievements.

Jean Hugo, a great grandson of the patriarch would seem. To have chosen an unusual path. Rather than struggling his way through life. Shackled by the heavy inheritance, or using it socially to his. Advantage, he chose to ignore it. He was remarkable in shrugging off. Promotion of his creative outlets. His talents, his exceptional list of friends and the circles in which he mixed, would have. Been sufficient to give him some. Additionally Olympian stature. Picasso kept telling him “you do nothing for your fame!”.

One of his many friends. Gustave Thibon, summarizes distinctively his soul: “He was a strange being, admirable, a mystic, a lover, a. Great artist who no doubt sinned by his excess of modesty”. He had the artist’s temperament in his blood. As did his great grandfather, he sketched and. Drew relentlessly from an early age.

His life was sliced in two equal parts, like the plates of a. Diptych, each of them defined by a woman. In the first, against the backdrop of the tumultuous Paris of the twenties, he met his first wife. Valentine Gross, at the apartment of Madame Alfred Edwards, later better known by the name of her third husband, Misia Sert. He married her, having Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau as witnesses to the wedding. During this period, his work centered on the theatre, lending his talents to many Cocteau plays and collaborating with Satie, Poulenc and even Carl Theodor Dreyer in his film, “The Passion of Joan of Arc”. Yet, Jean was moving gradually away from the temptations of Parisian life. A mystic streak was stirring in his blood.

In 1931 his growing discomfort. Also with urban pleasures and the failure of his ten-year marriage Furthermore. Precipitated his move to the country. At Lunel, near Montpellier, in the property inherited from his grandmother, he began experimenting with oils and endowing his choice of colors with a powerful luminosity. His new wife, Lauretta Hope-Nicolson, bore him seven children. Both devout Catholics, they lived in an old-fashioned style. In addition  entertaining lavishly and encouraging friends to stay for long periods.

Jean Hugo’s art, much like a large part of his existence, had to do with searching . Not only that for his own voice while staying away from the noise and influence of established currents. The exploration of his inner life emerged in his paintings and watercolors with a touch of innocence, almost primitive. Yet its subtle delicacy and crispness raises his work to a standard of prominence he never sought to cultivate.

THE TIES THAT BIND

A young woman acrobat in the Montmartre of the 1870s, could have easily been brought to life by Zola in one of his critical fictions. Nonetheless, Marie-Clémentine really existed. Born to a single mother, this precocious girl was forced to abandon the circus life after a fall. Her handsome looks opened doors for modeling in the artistic and carefree environment of Paris and she was soon one of the favorite sitters of Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec and many others.

Marie-Clémentine became Maria and earned a reputation as a reliable model. But the reputation she was after was of a higher order: she wanted to become a painter.During her coy sessions with the artists, she watched, asked and learned. As her popularity grew, her name changed yet again and Toulouse-Lautrec began calling her Suzanne. It was as if with each name a new chapter opened in her life. By this time, she took to drawing with fierce intensity, sketching with a sure hand female bodies. By the age of eighteen she gave birth to a son. A Spanish artist, Miguel Utrillo was willing to give the child his name. He may have gifted it in a flight of inebriated enthusiasm or from the true generosity of his heart, or even perhaps form his own biological seed. Suzanne never disclosed the paternity.

Her lifestyle did not adjust much to maternity. Increasingly confident in her work output and her feminine success, she continued to bewitch men. Erik Satie was strongly infatuated with her. She ended up marrying one of his friends, the banker Paul Moussis, a bourgeois moneyman who, for a while, tamed her bohemian spirit . Fully committed to her painting, but restless in having to deal with her son’s early alcoholism and bored by the conventions of her lifestyle, she took lover after lover. By 1909 after fourteen years of unfaithful marriage she began an affair with.  André Utter, an aspiring painter, friend of her son Maurice who often posed as a model himself. He was more than 20 years her junior. The roles are strangely reversed. the female painter chooses a younger male to serve her as a sitter although she was ironically more interested in the female figure. Utter entered her life not just as a lover but as an emotional support to Maurice. This unusual threesome was to last for twenty years.

Both Utrillo and Valadon’s art was rather indifferent, even taboo, to modern art historians and curators. She was considered mediocre, undistinguished and lacking formal training. Utrillo was the epitome of bourgeois taste, a representative of what the market perceived as bohemianism. His art is now being rescued from the clutches of bourgeois taste, whilst his mother’s aesthetic influence dims into oblivion. Their lives in contrast to oscillating tastes, are icons of modernist inspiration, drivers of rupture and defiant iconoclasts.