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New York Times
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Last Surrealist
It was Paris in the late 1950s, and Jean-Claude Silbermann knew where the Surrealists met every evening from 5 to 6 p.m. He waited outside Le Musset, a cafe between the Palais Royal and the Louvre, until André Breton — the writer and poet who led the fluctuating, anarchic group — emerged with about 15 of his acolytes. 'I didn't know how to do anything. I hadn't even written any poems,' Silbermann, now 90, said. 'It was ridiculous, but I went straight over to him and said: 'You are André Breton. I am Jean-Claude Silbermann. I'm a Surrealist.' At the time, and now, Silbermann thought of Surrealism as a frame of mind, a way of being in the world, and at its heart is revolt. Breton told the young man to join the nightly meetings whenever he wanted. Born in 1935 in Boulogne-Billancourt, on the western outskirts of Paris, Silbermann cut ties with his family as a teenager, leaving home to try his hand at poetry instead of joining his father's successful hat making business. 'I loved poetry since I was a little boy. At 18, I read 'Alcools,' by Guillaume Apollinaire. I opened the book, and when I closed it, the world had changed,' he told me, his French gallerist Vincent Sator, and the critic and art historian Philippe Dagen, on a recent sunny afternoon in Paris at Galerie Sator in the Marais, where some of the artist's enigmatic works hung on one wall. From the leafy suburbs of Paris, the young Silbermann traveled to Oslo and then Copenhagen, where he hitchhiked, worked on cargo boats and sometimes read palms to make a meager living. 'It was a con, but it paid for my cigarettes, my room and my food,' he said. 'It was a very pleasant life.' Back in Paris a few years later with a wife and a child, he acceded to pressure from his father to work in the family trade but was miserable with his bourgeois lifestyle. 'I gained 15 kilos in three months,' he said. 'Fifteen kilos of anxiety. Fifteen kilos of anguish.' His fateful meeting with Breton brought him back to poetry and, later, painting, both of which remain critical in life. In 2024 Dagen introduced Silbermann to Sator, whose grandmother Simone Khan was Breton's first wife. She was an active member of the Surrealists and opened her own gallery after World War II, to champion the movement's artists. And from May 8 to May 11, at the Independent Art Fair in Manhattan — just over 100 years after Breton wrote his first 'Manifesto of Surrealism' — Sator is showing Silbermann's colorful works filled with dreamlike imagery in the United States for the first time. Last fall, Silbermann's canvases, which are mounted on wood and cut into various shapes with a saw, were shown at the Pompidou's blockbuster 'Surrealism' exhibition, one of many global exhibitions to celebrate the movement's centenary. The show eschewed chronology for a spiraling maze of themes — dreams, the chimera, political monsters, the night, eros and more — that traced Surrealist tendencies all the way back to ancient Greece. 'Listen, I was very happy I was the only Surrealist alive in the exhibition. All the others were dead,' Silbermann told us in the gallery when asked what it was like to be part of a momentous historical retrospective. 'Maybe not for long, but still, I was the only one alive, and that was a lot of fun.' He insists that Surrealism — 'an attitude toward the world, not a stamp you put on a passport,' he said — is not over. The museum, the past, can only teach you so much: It is 'a great tomb, we have to do something else. Me, it's over, but the young people will interpret Surrealism in new ways,' he said humbly. 'I am the last Surrealist alive, but not the only living Surrealist.' Sator said that he will be showing 'young works,' with nearly all paintings made from 2021 to 2024. Only 'Vous Partez Déja?' ('You're already leaving?') is from earlier. That 2009 work shows a bright yellow bird, its feathers flecked with light, clutching two dusky pink and purple skulls as it takes flight. Golden foliage sprouts from the feathers atop its head. 'I have a taste for intellectual provocation,' Silbermann said. 'I never know what I'm going to do when I start working. This is not extraordinarily original. But I stop working when I don't understand it, when it escapes me. That's when I tell myself that it's over, because all of a sudden, I don't understand anything about it.' He has trouble with titles but is happy with 'You're Already Leaving?,' which he realized after it was finished must be a portrait of himself and his wife, Marijo. When I asked who the bird is, he laughed and did not answer. He and Marijo now live on the island of Port-Cros and Sannois, a Paris suburb. Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious has been important to Silbermann, as it was to many of his peers. He also talks about ideas like intuitive knowledge over reason, of the importance of the unknown, of being entangled in your life and art, and of having the profound desire, as well as the courage, to pursue art. 'There are better things to do with your life,' he said of his art practice, 'but I couldn't do anything else. I didn't have a choice. I had to be an artist. Surrealism is courage, fantasy, liberation, revolt.' In some works, figures move through fantastical scenes, locked in ambiguous courtship, becoming one with animals or landscapes, as in 'L'Attente et Le Moment du Fruit Orange' ('The Wait and the Moment of Orange Fruit,' 2024), or 'L'Attente et Le Moment du Blason' ('The Wait and the Moment of the Shield,' 2021-2022). Other pieces may be read as psychological stages both pained and transcendent. 'L'Attente et Le Moment de La Nuit' ('The Wait and the Moment of Night,' 2023) and 'L'Attente et Le Moment de L'Arc-En-Ciel' (The Wait and the Moment of the Rainbow,' 2022) feature writhing, nightmarish figures. 'La Nuit' is ominous, while 'L'Arc-En-Ciel' has a sense of release: The monsters take up only the lower half of the image, which is otherwise serene, with two men hovering weightlessly. These artworks appear slight from afar, but up close they possess a quiet luminosity and — even when dark — a sense of combinatorial play and tongue-in-cheek titles that also defined Silbermann's early work. In 1965, he created the centerpiece for the 11th International Exhibition of Surrealism. Entitled 'Le Consommateur' ('The Consumer'), the giant sculpture was a figure made from what he called a 'disgusting pink mattress' with a siren for its head, an open fridge for its back and a washing machine for its gut, in which daily newspapers tumbled over and over. Silbermann said that he is political in his life as a citizen, but not in his art. The stories he tells of his life bear witness to the violence and turmoil of the 20th century, and yet carry humor, amazement, modesty, optimism. He told of the French German Dadaist Hans Arp, who evaded conscription in World War I by filling in his papers with the correct details but then adding them all up in a vague column of nonsense — 'a recipe for imbecility.' To Silbermann this was not just chance or fate but play in the face of life and death. 'It's beautiful,' he said. He told of the relative of a friend in the World War II French Resistance who made a daring escape from the Gestapo. At the end of the war, Silbermann, who is Jewish, and his extended family were hiding in a house in the hills while his father served in the Resistance. German soldiers arrived and burned the house to the ground, giving the group just 10 minutes to escape. Silbermann described the fire as transfixing, Sator told me. In 1960, along with many other French intellectuals, Silbermann signed the 'Manifesto of the 121,' an open letter opposing the Algerian War, in which he refused to serve. Wracked and disoriented by the conflict, Silbermann was nearly driven to suicide, he said. He was ill for three years and couldn't write poetry any longer. At the suggestion of a friend, he began to paint. During our interview, he smiled and said it came more easily than poetry, quoting an old jazz standard: 'It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.' Then he adapted the sentence, perhaps so it covered the relationship between art and life: 'if you don't have this thing, you don't have anything.'
Forbes
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
This Exhibit Asks Whether Surrealism Would Have Been Better Without Its Leading Men
On October 15, 1924, André Breton published a manifesto that was as notable for its belligerence as its egotism. Striving to define one of the most influential artistic movements of the 20th century, his Surrealist Manifesto laid claim to 'the actual functioning of thought… exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.' Together with eighteen collaborators – predominantly poets and painters – Breton declared 'the omnipotence of dream' and provided a scheme for trouncing the 'reign of logic' through the practice of 'psychic automatism'. Leonora Carrington. Darvaux, 1950. Oil on canvas. 80 × 65 cm. Colección particular. © 2025, Estate of Leonora Carrington / VEGAP. Photo: Willem Schalkwijk Willem Schalkwijk But Breton was not the only one with designs on surrealism. Earlier in the same month, a poet named Yvan Goll published his own Surrealist Manifesto, backed by a completely different group of artistic confederates, standing for a completely different ideal. 'Reality is the basis of all great art,' he proclaimed. 'Without it there is no life, no substance.' The terms of disagreement were no mere coincidence. Goll set 'the emanation of life' in opposition to the exaltation of 'the dream and the random play of thought' that he attributed to 'ex-Dadaists' such as Breton. Goll's vision of Surrealism was situated in 'the ground under our feet and the sky over our head'. Even though Goll was the first to publish a manifesto of Surrealism – and in spite of the care he took to align himself with Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet who coined the term surreal in 1917 – Breton took such a forceful position that he effectively ousted Goll from art history. Breton's victory can partially be attributed to the relative novelty of his project (which transplanted Freud from the clinic to the gallery), in contrast to Goll's vaguer claims to radical change. To an even greater extent, Breton's triumph was achieved with aggressive ambition. (Concurrent with the publication of his manifesto, he and his collaborators established a Bureau for Surrealist Research in Paris. Ostensibly set up to study the 'unconscious activity of the mind', the bureau also issued letters to perceived enemies who called themselves Surrealists without permission, threatening to track them down and beat them to a pulp.) A century after the publication of Breton's manifesto, the identification of Surrealism with Breton's circle is scarcely questioned, even by the select few who know about his rivalry with Goll. Without challenging these historical facts, a major exhibition at the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid beguilingly sets out to explore 'Surrealism without Breton'. It should be stated upfront that 1924. Other Surrealisms is hardly a work of alternative history. The museum does not ask visitors to imagine that Breton had never been born, or to ask what would have happened if Goll had somehow outmaneuvered him. (Consistent with his historical erasure, Goll doesn't rank a single mention in the Fundación MAPFRE's 300-page exhibition catalogue.) Instead the exhibition curator emphasizes much of what Breton ignored or squelched within the realm of psychic automatism. In that sense, 1924 continues the efforts art historians have made since at least the 1980s, notably advanced several years ago in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Surrealism Beyond Borders. As scholarship becomes more encyclopedic, Surrealism benefits from greater inclusiveness. Approached as a phenomenon instead of a movement, Surrealism can encompass the work of artists who never enrolled in Breton's program (such as Joan Miró), those who were 'excommunicated' (such as Salvador Dalí), and those who were marginalized (such as Remedios Varo). Remedios Varo. Icon, 1945. Oil, mother-of-pearl inlay and gold leaf on panel. 60 × 70 × 35 cm. Colección MALBA. Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires 1997.02 © Remedios Varo; VEGAP, Madrid, 2025 Photo: Nicolás Beraza Nicolás Beraza There is real merit to this curatorial reconsideration of the artistic activity surrounding André Breton and his Bureau for Surrealist Research. His myopia was at least as deleterious to the liberation of the unconscious mind as his charisma were beneficial. Much is achieved through the simple act of exhibiting the numinous paintings of Varo and those of other women such as Leonora Carrington and Dorothea Tanning, who the misogynist Breton counted as muses rather than artists. Their work rewards the eye and mind to a greater extent than many of the more familiar paintings of more famous Surrealist men. And yet the invitation to explore Surrealism without Breton has the potential to be more generative than curators have heretofore allowed (even without entering into fantasies that his adversaries beat him up and chased him out of town). During the rivalry of 1924, Goll's ally Paul Dermée justly chastised Breton for 'monopoliz[ing] a movement of literary and artistic renewal that dates from well before his time and that in scope goes far beyond his fidgety little person'. The question that naturally arises is this: What might Surrealists have achieved had Surrealism been more inclusive while the Surrealists were alive? Breton presented Surrealism as pure and restrictive. Whereas Dada had upset the artistic and sociopolitical status quo with a panoply of absurdist antics, Surrealism was approached as a research and development program that would leverage Dadaist gains to complete the societal revolution that Apollinaire and his fellow agitators started. Logic would be supplanted in favor of a deeper truth revealed through Freudian psychology. For Breton, art was operational. Artists were enlisted to plumb surreality and to popularize it. The inherent orthodoxy of his premise excluded all other alternatives to narrow-minded rationalism and its ethical constraints. Goll's position is far too amorphous to extrapolate what his allies would have attempted (though his inclusion of the arch-Dadaist Tristan Tzara was auspicious). One reason why Breton's Surrealism ultimately proved so facile on aesthetic and moral grounds is that his methodology amounted to pseudo-science yet lacked the self-awareness to embrace its own phoniness (in contrast, for instance, to the performative irony of Dadaist pataphysics). Another reason is that it was built on the contradictory impulses to liberate the unconscious and to police those whose psyches were freed. Other Surrealisms that were genuinely different might have enriched Breton's project. They might have realized the potential he identified in his Manifesto to an even greater degree than the Surrealist works of women who proved better at pursuing his premises than the men he anointed. Dorothea Tanning. Birthday, 1942. Oil on canvas 102,2 × 64,8 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Adquirido con fondos aportados por C. K. Williams, II, 1999 1999-50-1. © Dorothéa Tanning; VEGAP, Madrid, 2025 ©Philadelphia Museum of Art Philadelphia Museum of Art When he sought surreality in 'the ground under our feet and the sky over our head', Yvan Goll provided at least one hint about what might be found there. 'Everything the artist creates has its point of departure in nature,' he wrote in his Manifesto. The strangeness that nature was already revealing as he wrote – from Einstein's General Relativity to the first inklings of quantum reality – has proven at least as unsettling as Freud's ideas about the human mind. The interaction of a Surrealism born out of physical phenomena with one emanating from psychology might have achieved the revolution sought by Breton and by the Dadaists before him. Otherness is the most potent quality of art as a sociopolitical proposition. Only a fidgety little person would seek to control it.
CBS News
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
On this day in 1981: Joan Miró's Chicago sculpture is unveiled downtown
On April 20, 1981 — 44 years ago Sunday — a long-awaited piece of public sculpture was unveiled to a crowd on a chilly day in downtown Chicago. Going back to the 1960s, a sculpture by Spanish Catalan artist Joan Miró had been part of the plan for the plaza next to the George W. Dunne Cook County Office Building — previously known as the Cook County Administration Building and originally the Brunswick Building. The building at 69 W. Washington St. was completed in 1964, and architect Bruce Graham of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill told Betty Blum of the Society of Architectural Historians that he was talking with Miró about the sculpture when the building was still in its early planning stages. But at first, the Brunswick Corporation — which used the building as its headquarters before Cook County took over — decided not to have it built, Graham said. In the meantime, Pablo Picasso's iconic untitled sculpture in Daley Plaza — then known as Civic Center Plaza — was unveiled in 1967. The Chicago Loop Alliance said Miró's sculpture was supposed to be unveiled the same year as the Picasso, but it ended up being shelved until more than a decade later. Finally, a deal was finally reached to have it built with the cost split between the City of Chicago and private fundraisers, according to Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. At last on that chilly day a few months into President Ronald Reagan's first term, the sculpture known as "Miró's Chicago" made its debut. Joan Miró (his first name is pronounced "zho-AN") was born April 20, 1893, in Barcelona. He began business school there at the age of 14 while also attending art school, but ended up abandoning business for art studies following a nervous breakdown, according to a biography from the Guggenheim . Miró attended Francesc Gali's Escola d'Art in Barcelona between 1912 and 1915, and art dealer Josep Dalmau staged Miró's first gallery show in Barcelona in 1918, according to the Guggenheim. He went on to split his time between Paris and Mont-roig, Spain, and he joined the Surrealist group — an avant-garde creative movement led by poet André Breton. Miró's work appeared in the First Surrealist Exhibition in Paris in 1925 — along with works by other masters such as Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Man Ray, and Picasso himself. But as noted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art , Miró was branching out from the Surrealists by the end of the 1920s. He began to experiment with novel materials and artistic techniques, and began developing collages, sculptures, and artworks on paper during the 1930s, the Met noted. In 1941, Miró had his first major museum retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. After World War II, he settled in Palma, Majorca, Spain, where he began working with ceramics and making models for large-scale abstract sculptures, the Met noted. "Miró's Chicago" — completed toward the end of the artist's life — was just such a creation. The 36-foot sculpture, originally known as "The Sun, the Moon and One Star," was built from steel, concrete, bronze, wire mesh, and some colorful ceramic tile. A description published by the Public Art Archive describes the sculpture as being imbued with "the mystical presence of an earth deity, both cosmic and worldly." The bell-shaped base — with its red, white, black, and blue tile patterns — represents Miró's association of the female form with the earth, the spherical center represents the moon, and the shape of the face is based on a ceramic hook, the Public Art Archive notes. The fork on the top of the sculpture's head represents a star, with each tine representing a ray of light, according to the Public Art Archive. Ahead of the long-anticipated unveiling of the sculpture, Bill Kurtis and his Focus Unit celebrated the artwork and the artist with a special Channel 2 News report — which included a visit to Majorca, Spain for an interview with Miró. When asked what he hoped people looking at his work on Washington Street in Chicago would think about upon seeing it, Miró said through an interpreter that he hoped they would "think that they're looking at something marvelous, and that tickles them up here," while rubbing his forehead. This report, unfortunately, is not available in the CBS Chicago archive. Monday, April 20, 1981, was Miró's 88th birthday. It was also the day that Mayor Jane Byrne pulled a cord to unveil Miró's iconic contribution to the aesthetics of downtown Chicago. But everything did not quite go as planned that day. In a Chicago Tribune report, Kurtis noted that he and CBS Chicago talk show host Lee Phillip co-anchored the dedication of Miró's sculpture — this, unfortunately, is not available in the CBS Chicago archive either. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra was also supposed to play, but it was too cold and their instruments risked being damaged. A massive crowd turned out nonetheless to see Mayor Byrne unveil the sculpture sometimes called "Miss Chicago." "As the years go by, as we continue to appreciate the work of the masters, that I myself will know that not just the city that works, but the city that has sort of a little heart, played a role today in Joan Miró's birthday in saying the commitment that was made to you in the 50s — to you, Picasso, and to you, Miró — is now completed," Mayor Byrne said. "It's a city that loves you. It's a city that loves its art. It's a city that loves itself. And for that reason, I'm delighted that today we have the completion of a promise." Leo Arnaud's "Bugler's Dream" — better known as the Olympic Anthem — played as Mayor Byrne tugged a rope to send the yellow veil dropping free. The veil did not cooperate at first, and the fur coat-clad mayor had to keep tugging repeatedly to get the veil off. The crowd applauded when the veil fell and the sculpture was revealed at last. One man called the sculpture "the high energy and style that's Chicago." But speaking to the late Channel 2 reporter and intrepid adventurer Bob Wallace, few seemed to be in agreement that it looked particularly like a woman. One man even called the sculpture "ugly" and said he didn't like it at all. It took less than two weeks for Miró's Chicago to be back in the headlines again. On May 1, 1981, as a May Day rally was going on downtown, someone threw a container of oil-based red paint at the base of the sculpture. Police quickly arrested art student Crister Nyholm, 24, of Chicago's Ravenswood neighborhood. Police said at the time that they were already in the area when the vandalism happened, and responded to the scene to find Nyholm just sitting there staring at what he'd done. As Channel 2 News reporter Frank Currier reported, Nyholm told police at the time that he vandalized the sculpture because he hated it, and it was something he had to do. Third Coast Review reported that art conservators from the Art Institute of Chicago stripped off the paint, and a judge sentenced Nyholm to probation and imposed a fine. Miró died Dec. 25, 1983, at the age of 90. In 2025, 44 years after it was unveiled, Miró's Chicago still stands proudly in the plaza between the George W. Dunne Cook County Office Building and the Chicago Temple. The sculpture will be covered temporarily this spring and summer during renovations of the walkways surrounding the county office building, and all measures are being taken to ensure it is protected to go back on proud display once the work is done.
New York Times
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Wife, Tigress, Influencer, Accountant, Nurse, Muse, Mystery
What is the value of a muse? That's the central question of Michèle Gerber Klein's biography of Gala Dalí, 'Surreal.' Dalí was known as 'the Mother of Surrealism,' the wife of Salvador, an adviser, a seductress. But as with so many influential women, her role was deliberately unseen. She was born Elena Ivanovna Diakonova, outside Moscow, in either 1890 or 1894 — depending on whose story you believe. When she was a child, her father disappeared while prospecting Siberian gold and her mother ended up going against religious rules barring widows from remarrying, wedding a Jewish Armenian lawyer. Gala was not allowed a higher education in pre-revolutionary Russia. She was also subject to disturbing harassment from her brother, who often appeared in her room at night. She claimed he never acted on any desires, but that the experience was emotionally excruciating. She developed a dry cough and an anxious demeanor and was sent to a Swiss sanitarium in 1912. There, she met Paul Éluard, soon to become one of the most famous poets in France. He would write her at least three poems about Pierrot the clown as they strolled through meadows of wildflowers. By the time both were pronounced cured, in 1914, they had to face not just disapproving parents but war. There was a lot of locking themselves in respective rooms in France and Russia to compose long love letters. Gala managed to travel to France, where she and Éluard married in 1917 and, the following year, had a daughter, Cécile. Both mother and child suffered from fragile health and 'did not bond.' Cécile was raised mostly by relatives and Gala was allowed to live a life, for better or worse, largely unfettered by child care. Paul and Gala became key members of the Dada movement. Gerber Klein, who previously wrote a vivid biography of the designer Charles James, relishes illustrating the power dynamics at play in burgeoning art scenes. Other Surrealists and their wives disliked Gala; she was not invited to the all-male meeting of the editorial panel of the Dada magazine, Littérature. But Gala was never one to dwell on a slight; and in any case, there was always the distraction of another trip to the south of France to cure a cold or do some gambling. In the tumult between the wars, while Gala was coming off a complicated entanglement with the artist Max Ernst, Éluard was dancing in Paris with another woman when he met the young Salvador Dalí. Dalí invited Éluard to visit him in Cadaqués, a Catalonian town just south of the French border. The Éluards showed up in the summer of 1929, and Gala spent the summer wearing bespoke silk pajamas, drinking Pernod and falling in love with Dalí. 'She could help him realize his talent, which in many ways expressed her own way of seeing. She was 10 years his senior, and she found the artist's youth and neediness very appealing,' Gerber Klein writes. 'Here was someone she could take in hand, buck up and lead.' And Dalí, a virgin at 25, seemed unlikely to stray. Gala taught him to dress better, to stop throwing chicken bones at the ceiling after eating and how to be less trusting. She divorced Éluard and married Dalí in 1934. In their mutual devotion, the couple were compared to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Gala Dalí also took charge of her husband's finances — paying the bills, signing the contracts and negotiating fees. If they had money troubles, she kept them hidden; in her words, 'pity kills strength.' Fixtures in the 'fluid high society of the interwar period' where everyone from Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli and Alfred Hitchcock to Bob Hope and Gloria Vanderbilt made a cameo, the couple spent most of their time in America, where Gala understood that her husband could make real money. Accordingly, Salvador Dalí designed a perfume bottle and a ceramic ashtray for Air India's first-class passengers and painted a lot of society portraits. In 1936, he made the cover of Time magazine. They returned to Europe in the late 1940s, the richest and most famous couple in art. 'She played wife, tigress, lover and mother, fashion influencer and model, art-world royalty and art critic manager, hard-nosed negotiator, welcoming hostess, bill collector, nurse and always the recurring mystical centerpiece of her husband's work,' Gerber Klein writes. While Gala Dalí comes off as fascinating and enigmatic, Gerber Klein makes it clear that her subject was willfully unknowable. She declined interviews and cultivated mystery. Guarded even with intimates, she was known as 'The Tower.' Readers of 'Surreal' will not come away with a better idea of what she thought about or what she was like when alone. Maybe that's because she never was. Gerber Klein concludes that Gala Dalí was more than a muse and more than a partner — that what she did was unquantifiable. But one thing is certain: Whatever else, she was a woman who knew her own worth.
Telegraph
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Drawings of Victor Hugo: claustrophobic, psychedelic
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.
