Jungle Book

Ian Hugo

"Jungle Book", like many of the Atelier 17 experimental prints, was done using both engraving for sharp line and soft ground etching, with fabrics and papers pushed into the soft ground to create the tones and textures.

Hugo's childhood was spent in Puerto Rico and the tropical landscape of his youth is often reflected in the Surreal imagery, such as "Jungle Book", which is probably also an homage to Kipling's childrens book that evoked such vivid images for so many children worldwide.

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) but he attended school in Scotland and graduated from Columbia University where he studied economics and literature.

He was working with the National City Bank when he met and married author Anais Nin in 1923. They 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 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 Atelier 17, established at the New School for Social Research.

Hugo was one the the early printmakers to help establish the Atelier 17 in New York with Hayter, who they had known in Paris. Hugo wanted to learn engraving so he could illustrate Anais Nin's books. She was having a difficult time finding publishers and they decided to publish and illustrate her works by themselves.

Hugo began producing surreal images that often accompanied 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, 1937-1939).

Responding to comments that viewers saw motion in his engravings, Hugo chose to take up filmmaking. He asked Sasha Hammid for instruction, but was told "Use the camera yourself, make your own mistakes, make your own style." What Ian Hugo did was to delve into his dreams, his unconscious, and his memories. With no specific plan when he began a film, Hugo would collect images, then reorder or superimpose them, finding poetic meaning in these juxtapositions. These spontaneous inventions greatly resembled his engravings, which he described in 1946 as "hieroglyphs of a language in which our unconscious is trying to convey important, urgent messages."

A fictionalized snapshot portrait of Ian Hugo, whose given name was Hugh Parker Guiler, and his wife, author Anais Nin, appears in Philip Kaufman's 1990 film "Henry & June."