The Drawings of Victor Hugo: claustrophobic, psychedelic

Telegraph

18-03-2025

A giant mushroom towers over a blasted landscape. A rampant octopus performs otherworldly semaphore with improbably knotted tentacles. A solitary eyeball (or planet?) spins in a grey void.
These are just three of the fantastical subjects depicted in this weird and psychedelic new exhibition of drawings by the 19th-century French literary colossus Victor Hugo. If you're up for a trip, Hugo's 'astonishing things' (as Vincent van Gogh described his works, although not necessarily his drawings) offer a wild ride.
Over a long career, much of which was spent in exile (in opposition to Napoléon III) on the Channel Islands, the Romantic author of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862) produced around 4,000 drawings, 70 of which (some barely bigger than a postage stamp) are now on display, against elegant blue walls, and for the first time in Britain since 1974, at the Royal Academy of Arts.
Most were produced for pleasure, or as gifts for family and friends, and weren't exhibited during his lifetime; Hugo, himself, seemed to downplay their importance, referring to them – in a quote reproduced on a large mesh screen dividing two of the show's four sections – as 'made in the margins or on the covers of manuscripts during hours of almost unconscious reverie with what remained of the ink in my pen'.
This suggests they were doodles, a diverting way for Hugo to wind down from writing. Yet, these intense compositions – the feverish by-products of a prolific, overheated creative mind – have a mesmerising peculiarity, like half-glimpsed visions of alternative dimensions. The final room, 'Ocean', groups together drawings with marine themes – a breakwater, a causeway, cephalopods, sinking or sunken ships, a raft-like 'boat without sails' – but there's a feeling, throughout, of encountering curious, encrusted phenomena dredged from the ocean's floor.
The drawings are fascinating, too, for the experimentation of their techniques. Striving for dramatic effects of light and shade, Hugo played with surprising methods, including using a feather's tip (to create an impression of moving water), and manipulating ink with a cloth (to convey distant sheets of rain). Long before the Surrealists (whose leader, André Breton, owned a couple of his drawings), Hugo was interested in 'automatic' techniques, discovering strange forms within random inkblots or 'taches'.
Sometimes, his shape-shifting subjects are too ambiguous to be deciphered. A substantial drawing of amoeba-like blobs could almost be a piece of 20th-century British abstraction. Another abstract picture may depict a ring of smudge-like heads (conjured by fingerprints) peering down into a well; then again, it may not.
Still, that (possible) subject sums up the claustrophobia in general of these drawings, which share recurrent motifs (castles, shipwrecks, storm-tossed landscapes), and a consistent 'look' that calls to mind burned gingerbread. Frequently, the mood is dark and oppressive. A hand seems to spasm, as if suffering great pain. A vast subterranean skull grows from the roots of a toxic tree like a malignant tuber. A cadaver hangs from a woebegone gibbet. (Hugo opposed capital punishment.) Even a supposedly 'cheerful' castle, as a later title puts it, appears decidedly creepy.
I wouldn't wish to be trapped for too long inside this cistern of a great author's imagination. But a small spell inside proves surprisingly invigorating, as well as alarming.