Ian Hugo
1898-1985
Born Hugh Parker Guiler in Boston, he lived his childhood in Puerto Rico (a "tropical paradise" the memory of which stayed with him and surfaces in both his engravings and his films). Parker then spent his school years in Scotland and at Columbia University where he studied economics and literature. He was working with the National City Bank when he met and married Anais Nin in 1923; they moved to Paris the next year, and in that city Nin’s diary and Parker’s artistic aspirations flowered. Parker 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. In 1940 he took up engraving and etching, studying under S.W. Hayter of Atelier 17, producing surreal images that often accompanied Nin’s books. For Nin his unwavering love and financial support were indispensable, he was "the fixed center, core...my home, my refuge" (Sept. 16, 1937, Nearer the Moon, The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1937-1939). A fictionalized portrait of him appears in Philip Kaufman’s 1990 Henry & June. Responding to comments that viewers saw motion in his engravings, Hugo chose to take up film-making. He asked Sa…
Films