Auction record for a work by Valentine Hugo
Valentine Hugo - Portrait dArthur Rimbaud - 1933Gerda Wegener - Summer - 1924
"Portrait of Arthur Rimbaud", painted in 1933 by Valentine Hugo, was sold yesterday 8 March at Bonhams London for £1.04 million ($1,4 million), a record price for this surrealist painter. On the same day, Bruun Rasmussen sold a portrait of Lili Elbe, the first person to undergo sex-change surgery.
Images: Valentine Hugo, "Portrait of Arthur Rimbaud", 1933 ·· Gerda Wegener, "I sommervarmen" (In the Heat of Summer), 1924
The "Portrait d'Arthur Rimbaud" is an oil on panel, 100 x 75 cm, painted by Hugo in 1933, at the height of the Surrealist movement. Described by Bonhams as "one of the artist's rare oil paintings and arguably the most important", and as a work that "transcending the border between visual arts and literature, celebrates another definition of beauty in the unexpected", the painting -although fully surrealist- immediately recalls the work of Symbolist artists like Franz von Stuck, such as his celebrated "Die Sünde" (1924).
Born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, Valentine Hugo (Valentine Marie Augustine Gross, 1887-1968) studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she developed an interest in ballet and met her husband, the painter Jean Hugo. During the 1920s she joined the surrealist movement, alongside artists such as André Breton, Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. Divorced from Jean Hugo in 1932, she continued to form part of the Surrealist group, and her works were included in the important exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936.
At the same Bonhams auction, "Méduse circonflexe", a small but vibrant canvas painted -also in 1933- by Max Ernst fetched £312,000 ($411,000).
Meanwhile, Bruun Rasmussen Copenhagen sold “I sommervarmen” (In the Heat of the Summer), a work by painter Gerda Wegener (1886-1940) depicting Lili Elbe, the first person to undergo sex change surgery, in 1930. Auctioned for 135,000 euros, it is an aucion record for a work by Wegener.

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