Ian Hugo

Ian Hugo was born Hugh Parker Guiler in Boston Massachusetts on February 15 1898 His childhood was spent in Puerto Ricoa 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 Nins diary and Guilers 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 Hayters experimental printmaking workshop Atelier 17 established at the New School for Social Research Hugo began producing surreal images that were often used to illustrate Nins books For Nin his unwavering love and financial support were indispensableHugo was the fixed center core my home my refuge Sept 16 1937 Nearer the Moon The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin 1937939 Fictionalized portraits of Higo and Nin appear in Philip Kaufmans 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 avantgarde 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 vibrant images then reorder or superimpose them seeking a sense of selfconnection 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 Nins 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 manmade landscape he dictated his memoirs into a tape recorder and would from time to time polish the copper matrices that held the engraved images of his supersensible worlds Hugos graphic works are represented in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art British Museum Brooklyn Museum Indianapolis Museum of Art US Library of Congress Museum of Modern Art National Gallery of Art Rose Art Museum Brandeis University and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art