VALENTINE HUGO

(1887-1968)

Portrait d'Arthur Rimbaud

Footnotes

Provenance
Paul & Lise Deharme Collection (acquired directly from the artist, by 1947); her collection sale, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 6 March 1953, lot 56.
Suzanne Chatelard Collection, Paris (by 1954).
Maïta Desmarais Collection, Antibes (by 1984).
Anon. sale, Catherine Charbonneaux, Paris, 17 December 2007, lot 143.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

Exhibited
Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Exposition Minotaure, May – June 1934, no. 56.
Avignon, Palais des Papes, Exposition de peintures et sculptures contemporaines, 27 June – 30 September 1947, no. 68.
Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Arthur Rimbaud, 1954, no. 1104.
Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Le Surréalisme, Sources, histoire, affinités, 1964, no. 175.
Bayonne, Entretiens de Bayonne, April - May 1967.
Vitry-sur-Seine, Galerie Municipale, La Part des femmes dans l'Art contemporain, 3 March - 13 April 1984, no. 54.
New York, The Grey Art Gallery and Study Centre, Cocteau generations, Spirit of the French Avant-Garde, 15 May – 23 June 1984, no. 117 (later travelled to Miami and Austin).

Literature
H. Read, Surrealism, London, 1936, no. 40 (illustrated).
A. de Margerie, Valentine Hugo 1887-1968, Paris, 1983 (illustrated pp. 78-79; incorrect dimensions).
'Rimbaud', in Grands Écrivains, Choisis par l'Académie Goncourt, no. 22, 1984 (illustrated on the back cover).
C. Bernheim, Valentine Hugo, Paris, 1990, p. 268.
B. Seguin, De Valentine Gross à Valentine Hugo, Boulogne-sur-Mer - Paris (1887-1968), Boulogne-sur-Mer, 2000 (illustrated p. 131).
'Valentine Hugo, l'égérie des surréalistes', in Le Figaro littéraire, 23 January 2003.
Exh. cat., Valentine Hugo, Le Carnaval des Ombres, Boulogne-sur-Mer, 2018, fig. 113 (illustrated p. 130).

Portrait d'Arthur Rimbaud by Valentine Hugo is one of the artist's rare oil paintings and arguably the most important. Transcending the border between visual arts and literature, it celebrates another definition of beauty in the unexpected.

Valentine Hugo was a painter, illustrator, and costume and set designer for the opera and the theatre. After her studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and a brief passage in Dadaism, she strayed from Dada's nihilistic, anti-rational ideas to devote herself entirely to Surrealism from 1925. Contrary to Dada, André Breton wrote in the first Surrealist Manifesto (1924) that art gives sense and meaning to life, and insisted on the influence of Freud, psychoanalysis, and the interpretive power of dreams which, according to Breton, were the paradigm of artistic inspiration. Trusting the freedom of imagination, the Surrealists did not explore nature but rather an inner, intimate world.

Although Valentine Hugo's entourage already included some important artistic figures of the early 20th century such as Jean Cocteau, Marcel Proust, Erik Satie and Pablo Picasso, her circle widened with the Surrealists. She became close to André Breton, Nusch and Paul Éluard, René Crevel, René Char, Gala and Salvador Dalí, Dora Maar, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, Tristan Tzara and Max Ernst, who painted a compelling portrait of her. Hugo joined the group as an artist in her own right and not as a muse: she was part of the Bureau of Surrealist Research and she was the first to draw 'exquisite corpses' on dark paper. She often took part in this collaborative artistic game, in which each participant took turns drawing on a sheet of paper before concealing their contribution and passing it to the next player. At the request of André Breton, she also participated in her first Surrealist exhibition at the Loeb Gallery in 1925. Afterwards, she was included in Surrealist exhibitions at the Pierre Colle Gallery in 1933, the Salon des Surindépendants in Paris in 1933, the Minotaure Exhibition at the Palais des Expositions in Brussels in 1934, the Gaceta de Arte de Tenerife exhibition in 1935, and the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936.

The present work is part of a very limited body of works, painted between 1932 and 1936, when Valentine Hugo focused on large formats in oil. Hugo reportedly told André Breton that she had dreamed about Rimbaud and he had encouraged her to complete the portrait. It was painted contemporaneously to her other great masterpiece, Les Surréalistes (1932), which was photographed by Man Ray before it was damaged at the MoMA exhibition in 1936. Her portrait of the Surrealists (including André Breton, Paul Éluard, René Crevel, and Tristan Tzara) follows the same structure as Portrait d'Arthur Rimbaud, laying the composition out from the lower left corner and focusing on the faces emerging from the dark, like an apparition.

Valentine Hugo never met Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), but the French poet was well-known in the 1930s and celebrated for his oneiric poetry, which seemed to dissolve dream into reality. Accordingly, he was an important influence for the Surrealists and a dazzling figure who wrote all his poetry in a span of just four years. His career ended abruptly at the age of twenty, following the breakdown of his tumultuous affair with the Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. Both men were passionate but violent, and Rimbaud left France to travel after the breakup. He became a merchant and travelled across continents, only returning to France after falling ill. He died in hospital in Marseille at age 37, in 1891, thus ending an extraordinary life worthy of myth.

In the present work, the poet's face emerges from the dark in the lower centre, below two birds that seem to emanate from his mind. One is an eagle, whose feathers blend into Rimbaud's hair and end in sharp blades. These are covered in red, green, white, and black droplets, showing Valentine Hugo's masterful draughtsmanship and her eye for detail. The other bird is white, resembling a swan, but with red feathers. The two birds intertwine in a fight, in which the eagle seems to protect Rimbaud from the sharp beak of the white bird. Five crows, which are a notorious harbinger of death in Rimbaud's poetry The Crows (Les Corbeaux) (1871), are hidden in the white bird's feathers. Nevertheless, this white bird of ill omen crowns Rimbaud with a laurel wreath, a symbolic attribute given to poets. The glory of the poet comes at a price however: one of the thorns pierces Rimbaud's forehead and causes glistening blood to drip from the wound. The blood stains his lips with red, which contributes to the poet's androgynous appearance. This could be a metaphorical allusion to Rimbaud and Verlaine's violent love affair. Verlaine had been the first to recognise Rimbaud's talent for poetry and invited him to Paris in 1871, but their story ended in blood, when Verlaine shot Rimbaud in 1873.

In Portrait d'Arthur Rimbaud the poet's face floats in murky, green water populated by strange sea creatures. A flat sea urchin lies on the foreground, and another spiny sea urchin hides behind the poet's right ear. The latter opens to reveal a soft, slimy, dripping interior surrounded by tentacles. This putrefying marine environment was likely inspired by Rimbaud's most famous poem, The Drunken Boat / (Le Bateau Ivre) (1871), which describes a similar setting: 'I have seen enormous swamps ferment, fish-traps / Where a whole Leviathan rots in the rushes! / (...) Hideous strands at the end of brown gulfs / Where giant serpents (are) devoured by bedbugs'.

Further referencing Rimbaud's life and work, Hugo added extracts from a letter and the seal of Menelik II, the future Negus (monarch) of Ethiopia, covered in a blood-like colour on the lower right. This excerpt was cut out by Hugo from Arthur Rimbaud's Letters, published in 1899 which recounts Rimbaud's trip to Africa and his later life as an adventurer and his ill-fated dealings with Menelik II just prior to his untimely death. Embodying the enigmatic legend of Rimbaud's poetry and travel, sensitivity and violence, masculine and feminine, dream and reality, life and death, the painting also draws parallels between Rimbaud and Hugo herself. Both figures were left by poets who broke their hearts. Painted in 1933, Portrait d'Arthur Rimbaud was realised after a brief but intense affair with André Breton in 1931-1932 which ended tempestuously and prompted Hugo to attempt suicide.

One of the most important elements of the painting is also the most perplexing: the flat sea urchin. With its exoskeleton, the sea urchin inverts interior and exterior, thus metaphorically becoming a symbol of inwardness and dreams made palpable in tangible reality. This makes it the perfect Surrealist symbol, and indeed André Breton had a similar flat sea urchin in his atelier. From the 1930s onwards, he mentions the animal in several poems, however, it is interesting to note that these references do not appear before 1934, a year after Valentine Hugo finished the Portrait d'Arthur Rimbaud in 1933.

Throughout the composition Valentine Hugo also added rhinestones. She described them as 'flies' and they echo the menacing sparkle in the eyes of the birds and the gleaming drops of blood throughout the composition. True to Surrealist art, and in the wake of Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst before her, Valentine Hugo uses wood, paper, and rhinestones, multiplying the means of expression that would give physical shape to her mind's vision. Blurring the boundaries between painting and literature, between painting and object, Valentine Hugo thus produces a work which directly responds to André Breton's founding Surrealist Manifesto by removing the barriers between dream and reality, art and life.

In the present work, just as in Rimbaud's poetry, Valentine Hugo explores an unexpected idea of beauty, inclined towards the odd, the troubling and the repulsive, and plays on the eerie fascination that they provoke. In that sense, this painting is Valentine Hugo's manifesto. It is a compelling Surrealist enigma where she unveils another conception of beauty, drawn on pain and violence, and inspired by dreams.