Valentine Gross Hugo: Fashion & Performance in Early Twentieth-Century French Magazines

Abstract

ABSTRACTValentine Gross Hugo, an artist remembered for her illustrations in surrealist poetry and edited collections beginning in the 1930s, started her career decades earlier in a flourishing Parisian journal industry. Her drawings and articles on ballet, theater, and fashion in magazines like Art et Décoration (1897–), La Revue Archéologique (1844–), Le Mercure Musical (1904–1914), Comoedia Illustré (1908–1921), La Gazette du Bon Ton (1912–1925), and La Revue Musicale (1920–1940), were some of the earliest representations of modernist trends in the performing arts. She was also one of the few women to contribute regularly to these journals and receive public praise from contemporary editors and journalists, attesting to her role as a legitimate translator of modernism for both a French and international audience. Examining her textual and visual commentaries on the Ballets Russes, her writing on the evolution and history of dance, and her designs for fashion and theater, this article argues that Hugo's unique interpretations shaped the reception of new and sometimes shocking aesthetic innovations.