Jean HUGO (1894-1984)

“Lively Garden and Street of a Mediterranean Village” & “Couple in the Park of an Estate”
Pair of gouaches, signed, 6 x 9 cm.
Antique gilded oak frame for the pair.
Collection Darius & Madeleine Milhaud.

This pair of small paintings condenses Jean Hugo’s entire poetic universe at the peak of his art in the 1920s.
Victor Hugo’s great-grandson lived through his century as both an actor and a keen observer. A set designer and easel painter, he regularly frequented the cultural, artistic, and social elite of the Roaring Twenties, without ever losing his poetic soul.
He withdrew from Parisian frivolities to his family farmhouse in Lunel in 1929, while frequently hosting friends who came to “get away from it all,” increasingly adopting the stature of a sage in his retirement over time.

The provenance of these works, bygone testimonies of a golden age of artistic creation, is not insignificant.
The Pigalle apartment of composer and conductor Darius Milhaud (Le bœuf sur le toit, 1920 – La création du Monde, 1923) and his wife, actress and librettist Madeleine Milhaud, became the epicenter of Parisian artistic life in the 1920s, bringing together musicians, poets, actors every Saturday, including Erik Satie, Georges Auric, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, Louis Jouvet… and the painters who collaborated with him on his sets, such as Fernand Léger, André Marchand, Jean Hugo…
These delicate gouaches come from this apartment on Bd Clichy where Madeleine Milhaud lived until her passing in 2008.