Ian Hugo

'On Stage' — Mid-Century Surrealism, Atelier 17

1946

Ferdinand Springer, 'Arbre-Homme', engraving, 1945, edition 23. Signed and numbered '23/20' in pencil. A fine, richly-inked impression, on heavy, b...

Lawrence Kupferman, 'Fantasia Americana – 1880', drypoint etching with sandground, 1943. Signed, titled, and annotated 'Series A, 1971 2/6' in pencil. A superb, richly-inked impression, on heavy, cream wove paper, with full margins (2 1/2 to 3 1/2 inches); the paper slightly lightened within the original mat opening, otherwise in excellent condition. One of only 6 impressions printed in 1971, with the added sandground grey background tint. Image size 11 13/16 x 14 3/4 inches; sheet size 18 x 20 1/4 inches. Archivally matted to museum standards, unframed. Collections: National Gallery of Art, Zimmerli Art Museum (Rutgers University). ABOUT THE ARTIST Lawrence Kupferman (1909 - 1982) was born in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston and grew up in a working-class family. He attended the Boston Latin School and participated in the high school art program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. In the late 1920s, he studied drawing under Philip Leslie Hale at the Museum School—an experience he called 'stultifying and repressive'. In 1932 he transferred to the Massachusetts College of Art, where he first met his wife, the artist Ruth Cobb. He returned briefly to the Museum School in 1946 to study with the influential expressionist German-American painter Karl Zerbe. Kupferman held various jobs while pursuing his artistic career, including two years as a security guard at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. During the 1930s he worked as a drypoint etcher for the Federal Art Project, creating architectural drawings in a formally realistic style—these works are held in the collections of the Fogg Museum and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In the 1940s he began incorporating more expressionistic forms into his paintings as he became progressively more concerned with abstraction. In 1946 he began spending summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he met and was influenced by Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, and other abstract painters. At about the same time he began exhibiting his work at the Boris Mirski Gallery in Boston. In 1948, Kupferman was at the center of a controversy involving hundreds of Boston-area artists. In February of that year, the Boston Institute of Modern Art issued a manifesto titled 'Modern Art and the American Public' decrying 'the excesses of modern art,' and announced that it was changing its name to the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). The poorly conceived statement, intended to distinguish Boston's art scene from that of New York, was widely perceived as an attack on modernism. In protest, Boston artists such as Karl Zerbe, Jack Levine, and David Aronson formed the 'Modern Artists Group' and organized a mass meeting. On March 21, 300 artists, students, and other supporters met at the Old South Meeting House and demanded that the ICA retract its statement. Kupferman chaired the meeting and read this statement to the press: “The recent manifesto of the Institute is a fatuous declaration which misinforms and misleads the public concerning the integrity and intention of the modern artist. By arrogating to itself the privilege of telling the artists what art should be, the Institute runs counter to the original purposes of this organization whose function was to encourage and to assimilate contemporary innovation.” The other speakers were Karl Knaths...

Ian Hugo, 'Mother of All', engraving, 1945, edition 50. Signed, dated, titled, and numbered '48/50' in pencil. With the blind stamp 'madeleine-claude jobrack...

Ian Hugo, 'Together', from the portfolio 'Ten Engravings'. engraving, 1946, edition 50. Signed, dated, titled, and numbered '22/50' in pencil. A fine impression, with delicate overall plate tone, on cream wove paper, the full sheet with wide margins (2 7/8 to 5 1/2 inches), in excellent condition. With the blind stamp 'madeleine-claude jobrack EDITIONS', in the bottom right margin. Matted to museum standards, unframed. Image size 5 7/8 x 4 7/8 inches (149 x 124 mm); sheet size 15 x 11 1/8 inches (381 x 283 mm). Collection: Indianapolis Museum of Art. Ian Hugo originally created "Ten Engravings" in 1945 and the portfolio included a foreword by his partner and collaborator, Anais Nin. In 1978, Hugo republished the portfolio with Madeleine-Claude Jobrack, an American master printmaker who studied under Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17, Paris, and with Johnny Friedlaender. When Jobrack returned to the States she managed the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Studio in New York before opening her own printing studio, Madeleine-Claude Jobrak Editions. “The sign of the true artist is one who creates a complete universe, invents new plants, new animals, new figures to transfer to us a new vision of the universe in which dream and reality fuse. Ian Hugo's plants have eyes, the birds have the delicacy of dragonflies, their feathers have the shape of fans. Humor is apparent in every gesture. He uses a fine spider web to give a feeling of flight, speed, lightness. The body of a woman reveals the structure of a leaf, a plant. Wings are moving in a world unified by mythological themes. This is an animated world, humorous and levitating, elusive and decorative, which by its unique forms and shapes gives us the sensation of a rebirth, a liberation from the usual, the familiar, a visit to a new planet.” —Anais Nin, from the forward to the portfolio ‘Ten Engravings’ ABOUT THE ARTIST Ian Hugo was born Hugh Parker Guiler in Boston, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1898. His childhood was spent in Puerto Rico—a "tropical paradise," the memory of which stayed with him and surfaced in both his engravings and his films. He attended school in Scotland and graduated from Columbia University where he studied economics and literature. Hugo was working with the National City Bank when he met and married author Anais Nin in 1923. The couple moved to Paris the following year, where Nin's diary and Guiler's artistic aspirations flowered. Guiler feared his business associates would not understand his interests in art and music, let alone those of his wife, so he began a second, creative life as Ian Hugo. Ian and Anais moved to New York in 1939. The following year he took up engraving and etching, working at Stanley William Hayter’s experimental printmaking workshop Atelier 17, established at the New School for Social Research. Hugo began producing surreal images often used to illustrate Nin's books. For Nin, his unwavering love and financial support were indispensable—Hugo was the "fixed center, core... my home, my refuge" (Sept. 16, 1937, Nearer the Moon, The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1937-!939). Fictionalized portraits of Higo and Nin appear in Philip Kaufman's 1990 film drama of a literary love triangle, Henry & June. Inspired by comments that viewers saw motion in his engravings, Hugo took up filmmaking. He asked the avant-garde filmmaker Sasha Hammid for instruction but was told, "Use the camera yourself, make your own mistakes, make your own style." Hugo embarked on an exploration of the film medium as a vehicle to delve into his dreams, his unconscious, and his memories. Without a specific plan, He would collect resonant images, then reorder or superimpose them, seeking a sense of self-connection through the poetic juxtapositions he created. These intuitive explorations resembled the mystical evocations of his engravings, which he described in 1946 as "hieroglyphs of a language in which our unconscious is trying to convey important, urgent messages." In the underwater world of his film ‘Bells of Atlantis,’ the light originates from the world above the surface; it is otherworldly, out of place, yet essential. In ‘Jazz of Lights,’ the street lights of Times Square become in Nin's words, "an ephemeral flow of sensations." This flow that she also calls "phantasmagorical" had a crucial impact on Stan Brakhage, who said that without Jazz of Lights (1954), "there would have been no Anticipation of the Night" his autobiographical film which ushered in a new era of experimental modernist filmmaking. Hugo lived the last two decades of his life in a New York apartment high above street level. In the evenings, surrounded by an electrically illuminated man...

Ian Hugo, 'Early Marshes', from the portfolio 'Ten Engravings'. engraving, 1943, edition 50. Signed, dated, titled, and numbered '37/50' in pencil. A fine impression, with delicate overall plate tone, on cream wove paper, the full sheet with margins (2 5/8 to 7 inches), in excellent condition. With the blind stamp 'madeleine-claude jobrack EDITIONS', in the bottom right margin. Matted to museum standards, unframed. Image size 5 x 5 7/8 inches (127 x 149 mm); sheet size 15 x 11 inches (381 x 279 mm). Ian Hugo originally created "Ten Engravings" in 1945 and the portfolio included a foreword by his partner and collaborator, Anais Nin. In 1978, Hugo republished the portfolio with Madeleine-Claude Jobrack, an American master printmaker who studied under Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17, Paris, and with Johnny Friedlaender. When Jobrack returned to the States she managed the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Studio in New York before opening her own printing studio, Madeleine-Claude Jobrak Editions. “The sign of the true artist is one who creates a complete universe, invents new plants, new animals, new figures to transfer to us a new vision of the universe in which dream and reality fuse. Ian Hugo's plants have eyes, the birds have the delicacy of dragonflies, their feathers have the shape of fans. Humor is apparent in every gesture. He uses a fine spider web to give a feeling of flight, speed, lightness. The body of a woman reveals the structure of a leaf, a plant. Wings are moving in a world unified by mythological themes. This is an animated world, humorous and levitating, elusive and decorative, which by its unique forms and shapes gives us the sensation of a rebirth, a liberation from the usual, the familiar, a visit to a new planet.” —Anais Nin, from the forward to the portfolio ‘Ten Engravings’ ABOUT THE ARTIST Ian Hugo was born Hugh Parker Guiler in Boston, Massachusetts, on February 15, 1898. His childhood was spent in Puerto Rico—a "tropical paradise," the memory of which stayed with him and surfaced in both his engravings and his films. He attended school in Scotland and graduated from Columbia University where he studied economics and literature. Hugo was working with the National City Bank when he met and married author Anais Nin in 1923. The couple moved to Paris the following year, where Nin's diary and Guiler's artistic aspirations flowered. Guiler feared his business associates would not understand his interests in art and music, let alone those of his wife, so he began a second, creative life as Ian Hugo. Ian and Anais moved to New York in 1939. The following year he took up engraving and etching, working at Stanley William Hayter’s experimental printmaking workshop Atelier 17, established at the New School for Social Research. Hugo began producing surreal images often used to illustrate Nin's books. For Nin, his unwavering love and financial support were indispensable—Hugo was the "fixed center, core... my home, my refuge" (Sept. 16, 1937, Nearer the Moon, The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1937-!939). Fictionalized portraits of Higo and Nin appear in Philip Kaufman's 1990 film drama of a literary love triangle, Henry & June. Inspired by comments that viewers saw motion in his engravings, Hugo took up filmmaking. He asked the avant-garde filmmaker Sasha Hammid for instruction but was told, "Use the camera yourself, make your own mistakes, make your own style." Hugo embarked on an exploration of the film medium as a vehicle to delve into his dreams, his unconscious, and his memories. Without a specific plan, He would collect resonant images, then reorder or superimpose them, seeking a sense of self-connection through the poetic juxtapositions he created. These intuitive explorations resembled the mystical evocations of his engravings, which he described in 1946 as "hieroglyphs of a language in which our unconscious is trying to convey important, urgent messages." In the underwater world of his film ‘Bells of Atlantis,’ the light originates from the world above the surface; it is otherworldly, out of place, yet essential. In ‘Jazz of Lights,’ the street lights of Times Square become in Nin's words, "an ephemeral flow of sensations." This flow that she also calls "phantasmagorical" had a crucial impact on Stan Brakhage, who said that without Jazz of Lights (1954), "there would have been no Anticipation of the Night" his autobiographical film which ushered in a new era of experimental modernist filmmaking. Hugo lived the last two decades of his life in a New York apartment high above street level. In the evenings, surrounded by an electrically illuminated man...

Ian Hugo, 'Encircled', engraving, 1946, edition 50. Signed, dated, titled, and numbered '5/50' in pencil. With the blind stamp 'madeleine-claude jobrack EDIT...

This piece is a limited edition, pencil signed by the artist on the print and in the plate. It is part of my private collection of artists from the School of Paris era. It is in very...

Artist: Salvador Dali (Spanish, 1904-1989) Title: "Frère Ogrin, l'hermite (Brother Ogrin, the Hermit)" Portfolio: Tristan et Iseult *Monogram signed by Dali in pencil lower right Year: 1970 Medium: Original Engraving on Mandeure paper Limited edition: 101/125 Printer: Atelier Rigal, Paris, France Publisher: Leon Amiel, New York, NY and Paris, France Reference: "The Official Catalog of the Graphic Works of Salvador Dali" - Field No. 70-10-K, page 60; "Dali: Catalogue Raisonné of Etchings and Mixed-Media Prints, 1924-1980" - Michler/Löpsinger No. 416, page 183-184 Framing: Recently framed in a gold ornate moulding with matting from Holland, gold filet, and Museum glass. All archival Framed size: 28" x 22.25" Sheet size (folded): 18" x 12.75" Sheet size (unfolded): 18" x 25.5" Image size: 15.75" x 10.5" Condition: One tiny tear upper left. Some faint spots lower left. It is otherwise a strong impression is excellent condition Notes: Provenance: private collection - Indianapolis, IN; acquired from Ferdinand Roten Galleries, Baltimore, MD retaining their original gallery label on verso. Numbered by Dali in pencil lower left. Comes from Dali's 1970 "Tristan et Iseult" portfolio of 21 color engravings. Leon Amiel chop mark/blind stamp lower left. These engravings from the "Tristan et Iseult" portfolio were printed on folded sheets with their respective text descriptions as issued. We are specialists in Salvador Dali's printmaking oeuvre, having personally worked with his cataloger Albert Field in the 1980's, we unconditionally guarantee all of our examples to be authentic. Biography: Salvador Dalí (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres, Spain. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media. Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes...

complete set of 100 plates from the Divine Comedy Perfect condition. Illustration pages only, no text. Justification pages included.

Artist: Salvador Dali (1904-1989) Year: 1963 Medium: Wood engraving in colors on Rives BFK paper Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued Edition: 4765 in French; 3188 in Ital...

Artist: Salvador Dali (1904-1989) Year: 1963 Medium: Wood engraving in colors on Rives BFK paper Inscription: Unsigned and unnumbered, as issued Edition: 4765 in French; 3188 in Italian, plus proofs Catalogue Raisonne Reference: Michler & Löpsinger 1039-1138; Field 189-200 Size: 13 x 10.25 inches Condition: Excellent Notes: The Salvador Dali Divine...

Artist: Salvador Dali (1904-1989) Suite: Göttliche Komödie (The Divine Comedy) Year: 1974 Medium: Wood engraving in colors on BFK Rives wove paper tipped to Arches paper mounts Inscr...