Ian Hugo

Hugh Parker Guiler, known as Ian Hugo (1898–1985), was an American banker, printmaker, and independent filmmaker, best known as the husband of Anaïs Nin. He spent his childhood in Puerto Rico, where his father managed sugar refineries, and part of his youth in Scotland before studying economics and literature at Columbia University. Married in 1923, Hugh and Anaïs Nin moved to Paris the following year. While he pursued a successful career in finance, Anaïs began writing her celebrated diary. During the 1930s, their home became an important meeting place for artists and writers. He studied printmaking with Stanley William Hayter, adopting the pseudonym Ian Hugo and developing a body of work strongly influenced by Surrealism. In New York, his encounter with the Czech filmmaker Alexander Hammid introduced him to experimental cinema, which he began practicing in the late 1940s. Between 1950 and 1953, Ian Hugo made three short films accompanied by texts by Anaïs Nin, read by the writer herself. Combining documentary footage, non-figurative imagery, and superimpositions, his works formed visual collages with dreamlike qualities that would influence filmmaker Stan Brakhage. The freedom he enjoyed, made possible by his financial independence, allowed him to continue his artistic work while also supporting Anaïs Nin’s projects. In the last twenty years of his life, he made eleven additional films and wrote his memoirs.