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The Guardian
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo review – masterpieces from a man with a heart as big as the Notre Dame
Victor Hugo is the French equivalent of Shakespeare and Dickens. The inventor of Quasimodo and Jean Valjean is so universal that we absorb his myths even if we have never picked up one of his books. Yet how much do most of us know about Hugo himself, behind the books, the films, the musicals? By dedicating an exhibition to this versatile creator's visual art, which started with a few caricatures and developed into sublime and surreal masterpieces, the Royal Academy does something unexpectedly moving. It takes you into the secret heart of a man we tend to think of only as a classic. For instance we discover that Hugo campaigned against the death penalty nearly two centuries ago. His 1854 drawing Ecce Lex (Behold the Law) is a macabre inky portrait of a hanged corpse, part of his doomed campaign to save a condemned murderer called John Tapner. Hugo opposed capital punishment on principle, but a few years later gave permission for this drawing to be made into a print protesting the execution of American anti-slavery activist John Brown. If there was a liberal cause, Hugo threw his huge heart into it. One of the first drawings you encounter in this sensitively curated show is his sketch of the council chamber in the town hall of Thionville in the north-east of France, after it was left in ruins by the invading Prussian army in 1871. Thus, in his late 60s, he added war artist to his vocations of author and campaigner, and recorded the violence of the Franco-Prussian war. In fact, this disaster for France improved his own life. It led to the fall of the dictator Louis Napoleon, whom Hugo had defied, choosing political exile on Guernsey, where he created some of his most haunting art. That was his public life. Hugo's art, however, takes you under his skin, without rules or any audience except himself, absolutely free and dauntingly creative. You can feel the isolation and soul-searching in his 1850 sketch Causeway, which dwells on nothing more than a bleak rocky causeway, perhaps his road to exile. In a drawing beside it he ponders the woody morass of a soaking breakwater in Jersey – the first Channel Island to which he fled. Sketch? Drawing? It's hard to define exactly what these are. Hugo uses a mixture of ink, charcoal, graphite and wash to create his murky paper visions. Sometimes he works on a tiny scale: The Abandoned Park, a silhouette-like image of trees beside a mirroring lake, is just 4.4cm tall and 3.5cm across. The miniaturisation adds to the ghostliness. Yet he can also take drawing to staggering largeness, as in the final depiction of a Guernsey lighthouse with a frail staircase spiralling up to a mystical, hopeful light. At times Hugo is just the writer doodling – using up spare ink, he said – yet his doodles develop. A symmetrical ink stain, like a Rorschach blot, has little faces drawn into it. Other frolics that Hugo called 'taches', or stains, are boldly abstract. Sometimes they form themselves into cosmic visions of planets or unreal landscapes but others remain free and formless. Out of this wild freedom a theme emerges: architecture. This should not be a surprise because after all the real hero of his novel Notre-Dame de Paris is not Quasimodo but Notre-Dame itself – a tottering, unloved old pile of stone when Hugo wrote it. So as well as Dickens, he resembles those Victorian champions of the gothic Ruskin and Pugin. But he's Ruskin on a lot of beaujolais, his imagination drunk on gothic turrets and spires; castles on hilltops or by lakes; fairytale castles and nightmare castles; real ones and dreamed ones. When he visited the town of Vianden, in today's Luxembourg, its castle fascinated him so much he lived in it for three months. He depicts it as shadowy and unreal, like a design for a 30s horror movie. In a second drawing the castle is a floating phantasm above a rickety array of wooden houses: not so much Dracula's castle as Kafka's. When Hugo lived on Guernsey he turned his house into a gothic retreat with a Romantic interior full of fantastical touches. It is evoked here with spooky photographs and a battered mirror whose wooden frame he painted with colourful birds. His fireplace, which he sketched, was emblazoned with a huge H, as if he were a medieval lord. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion We think of French art in the 19th century as a series of 'isms' – Romanticism being defeated by realism giving way to impressionism which inspired post-impressionism. Hugo was a Romantic yet he lived on until 1885, doing the art we see here into old age – and it is timeless, eternally contemporary. Uninterested in artistic fashion – his living came from writing – he followed his own fancy. Like Goya, whom he often resembles, this makes his art speak directly to us. Here is a portrait of an octopus, which he must have seen from the Guernsey rocks, its flailing tentacles making him, and you, wonder if it has a consciousness. Hugo feels the universal pulse of life. He can empathise with medieval outcasts, hanged men and cephalopods. What an artist. What a soul. Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo is at the Royal Academy, London, 21 March to 29 June
Telegraph
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘Once shown, they'll have to be kept in the dark for years': the secret drawings of Victor Hugo
Juliette Drouet, the lover of Victor Hugo for half a century, enjoyed one great consolation for his absence when he was at home with his wife: his visual art. As she put it in a letter to Hugo in 1847, written in anticipation of the novelist's next visit: 'While I wait for the happy moment, I look at the array of beautiful drawings you have done at my house and I open my gob really wide and my eyes as wide as the Porte Saint-Denis.' The Royal Academy's new exhibition of Hugo's drawings and other artworks is indeed an eye-opener – and a jaw-dropper. As the creator of characters who have become immortal – Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert in Les Misérables, Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame – Hugo remains vividly alive as a novelist. Yet not many of us know that he was also a visual artist of great power. Few of Hugo's drawings were exhibited in his lifetime (1802-85), but his readers would not have been surprised to learn of his artistic talent: his pictorial sense is apparent in his writing. Vincent van Gogh declared that after he had read Les Misérables, landscapes started to strike him as resembling 'a page from Hugo'. The Dutch artist's description, in a letter to his brother, of the 'astonishing things' conjured by Hugo's hand provides the title for the new exhibition, curated by the Royal Academy's Sarah Lea. For Lea, Hugo's drawings 'really are the most extraordinary things when you see them face-to-face. Once the drawings are shown, they then have to be kept in the dark for a minimum of five years, because the inks and the papers are so vulnerable to light.' Many of the drawings have been lent by Maisons Victor Hugo, which administers the museum based in his former home in Paris, as well as Hauteville House in Guernsey, where he lived as a political exile for 14 years from 1856. Other items come from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, while the handful of Hugo drawings in UK collections – held by the British Museum and the John Rylands Library in Manchester – have also been loaned. The drawings span many different styles and modes. Ecce Lex (1854), a grim representation of a hooded man hanging from a gibbet, was Hugo's response to the 1854 execution in Guernsey of the murderer John Tapner; he allowed a print of it to be circulated, and such was its impact on public opinion that no criminal in Guernsey was executed ever again. Five years later, he had the print recirculated under the title John Brown, as a protest against the hanging of the US abolitionist. It is just the type of tendentious piece one would expect of a man who had agitated against capital punishment since his first novel, The Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829). And yet his more abstract and ephemeral-seeming sketches can be just as compelling. There are more than 70 drawings in the exhibition, a tiny fraction of more than 4,000 known to exist. 'He did retain all these often very marginal sketches, scraps really – obviously they were meaningful to him,' says Lea. She observes that 'his drawing was really a way of thinking and expressing himself'; he did not follow any fashion or school. His most memorable foray into criticism was to ask why Courbet, if he claimed to be a realist, did not include dog muck in his street scenes. One might have thought that an artist as accomplished as Hugo would have illustrated his fiction, just as his English contemporary W M Thackeray, a far shoddier draughtsman, insisted on providing his own awkward drawings to accompany Vanity Fair and other books. But, for most of his career, Hugo was content for his novels to be illustrated by other hands. Nevertheless, the British author Graham Robb – whose biography of Hugo is acknowledged even by French critics as definitive – takes the view that 'a lot of the drawings look like they could be illustrations for his novels and poems. They make me think of Mervyn Peake: the writings and artwork are not always directly connected, but recognisably the work of the same man.' Hugo became friends with many artists as, precociously, he rose to fame in his 20s; Delacroix designed some of the scenery for his early plays. But for many years, although he enjoyed dashing off caricatures, he showed no interest in producing serious art himself. In his mid-30s, he embarked on a series of trips to the Rhineland, partly to cash in on a vogue for travel writing, partly to spend time with Drouet away from his wife. He began to sketch the landscapes he encountered there, with a particularly sharp eye for medieval castles (a keen medievalist, he had kickstarted a revival of interest in gothic architecture with The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in 1831). The death of his daughter Léopoldine in 1843 left him too grief-stricken to travel, and he began to spend more time drawing at the home of Drouet, either reworking his Rhineland sketches or inventing his own buildings and monuments. La Tour des Rats (1847), a large-scale version of a sketch from 1840, is more atmospheric and technically ambitious than the original, with charcoal used to cloud much of the picture in a minatory darkness, and ink pulled with a cloth to depict teeming rain. Other work from this period is positively surreal. In 1850, the year before his opposition to Napoleon III forced him to flee France, he produced an extraordinary depiction of a giant mushroom with a human face visible in its stem, standing in a desolate landscape. 'I think of it maybe as a commentary on the environment; Hugo's been discussed as being a proto-environmentalist,' says Rose Thompson, assistant curator at the RA. 'Or perhaps it's something to do with the political anguish he was feeling in Paris at the time.' Rejecting Napoleon III's offer of amnesty to political exiles in 1859, Hugo did not return to France until 1870. He spent his time at Hauteville House, writing endlessly – and drawing. I ask Robb if he thinks Hugo found drawing to be a form of relaxation. 'More a kind of contemplation, I think, which is perhaps the opposite of relaxation,' he says, 'a contemplation of the interconnected universe in which all things have spirit and soul, and the prayerful aspect of putting yourself in the hands of chance, allowing the universal forces to act on your work.' Chance played an increasing role in Hugo's compositions: more and more, he would stain pieces of paper with ink and tease shapes out of the blotches, or indulge in a process of automatic drawing akin to the automatic writing he had learnt about when he fell under the spell of spiritualism after Léopoldine's death. His choice of medium was sometimes dictated by whatever he had to hand: coffee grounds, soot and toothpaste all variously served as substitutes for ink. 'Although we have a sense of his great books as monolithic, there's also something very throwaway and reckless about everything he did,' says Robb. 'He would scatter sheets of manuscript down into the garden below when he was writing in his 'Look-out' at the top of Hauteville House. And we see it in the spontaneity of valuing slips of the pen, and using bits of food, saliva and goodness knows what else in these drawings. Even quite recently, French critics in particular thought it was a bit embarrassing that he should do something so apparently flippant and childish. But he liked to provoke. Almost every aspect of his career was revolutionary in some way – against the tide.' Hugo did finally consent to illustrate one of his own novels, Toilers of the Sea (1866); the exhibition includes his fine ink and wash rendering of the killer octopus from that book. But drawing remained largely a private pursuit for him and, like much of his writing, contained elements suggestive of a strong sense of personal mythology. Just as he calculated the date on which he had been conceived – 24.6.01 – and used that figure as Jean Valjean's prison number in Les Misérables, so he often hid his name or initials in his drawings. Not until 1888 – three years after Hugo had died, a French national hero with two-million people turning out for his funeral – was there a proper exhibition of his drawings, and widespread recognition of his talent. 'From that exhibition onwards, you have the symbolist poets, and artists associated with them, being interested in the more poetic and mystical aspects of his drawings,' notes Lea. 'And later, the surrealist generation: Breton owned two drawings; Max Ernst was always taking techniques that Hugo had trialled and exploring them to make entire series of work. Today, his fans include Antony Gormley and Tacita Dean – two very different artists. But they appreciate his very instinctive and intuitive way of working, I think.' Finally, she sees Hugo's drawings as expressing a part of himself that he could not give vent to in his writings. 'For me, there is often an undercurrent of threat or violence, even in the romantic drawings of the castles. He lived through very violent times and if in his novels the message is all about hope and belief in humanity, maybe his drawings were somewhere he could explore the darker side of human nature, including his own.' Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo is at the Royal Academy of Arts, London W1 ( from March 21 to June 29
