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South China Morning Post
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Les Miserables author Victor Hugo's drawings, ‘as poetic as his writing', shown in London
French writer Victor Hugo is famous for penning The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Miserables, but less known is his work as an illustrator – the subject of a new exhibition in London. Advertisement 'Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo', at the Royal Academy of Arts, traces Hugo's passion for illustration, 140 years after his death. The exhibition's notes say that while the Romantic author and politician came to be a leading public figure in France in the 19th century, 'in private, his refuge was drawing'. 'Hugo's ink and wash visions of imaginary castles, monsters and seascapes are as poetic as his writing,' says the Royal Academy of Arts. A gallery worker with The Castle with the Cross (1875) at a press preview for the exhibition Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Photo: EPA-EFE 'His works inspired Romantic and Symbolist poets, and many artists including the Surrealists. Vincent van Gogh compared them to 'astonishing things'.' Advertisement For a long time, Hugo showed his drawings only to close friends, even though he ensured their posterity by donating them to France's national library.
Asharq Al-Awsat
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Asharq Al-Awsat
London Exhibit Spotlights Victor Hugo's Lesser-known Talent -- Drawing
French writer Victor Hugo is famous for penning "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" and "Les Miserables", but less known is his work as an illustrator -- now the subject of a new exhibition in London. "Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo", which opened at the Royal Academy of Arts on Friday, traces Hugo's passion for illustration, 140 years after his death. The exhibition's notes say that while the Romantic author and politician came to be a leading public figure in France in the 19th century, "in private, his refuge was drawing". "Hugo's ink and wash visions of imaginary castles, monsters and seascapes are as poetic as his writing," according to the Royal Academy of Arts. "His works inspired Romantic and Symbolist poets, and many artists including the Surrealists. Vincent van Gogh compared them to 'astonishing things'." For a long time, Hugo showed his drawings only to close friends, even though he ensured their posterity by donating them to France's national library. The works, many made of ink washes, graphite pencil and charcoal, are "rarely on public display and were last seen in the UK over 50 years ago," the academy added. The exhibition of about 70 drawings seeks to address the relationship between Hugo's artistic and literary work, AFP reported. Most were made between 1850 and 1870, the period he was exiled to the island of Guernsey following a coup d'état in December 1851 by Napoleon III. It was while in exile that Hugo completed some of his major works, including "Les Chatiments" (The Castigations) and "Les Miserables". The exhibition tracks his progress from early caricatures and travel drawings to dramatic landscapes and his experiments with abstraction. While his writings were deeply rooted in reality and tackled subjects such as social deprivation and the death penalty, certain drawings are more enigmatic, like "Mushroom" which depicts a giant anthropomorphic toadstool. However the influence of his political beliefs can be seen in "Ecce Lex" (Behold the law), which shows a hanged man. The London exhibition is scheduled to run until 29 June.
Yahoo
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
London exhibit spotlights Victor Hugo's lesser-known talent -- drawing
French writer Victor Hugo is famous for penning "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame" and "Les Miserables", but less known is his work as an illustrator -- now the subject of a new exhibition in London. "Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo", which opened at the Royal Academy of Arts on Friday, traces Hugo's passion for illustration, 140 years after his death. The exhibition's notes say that while the Romantic author and politician came to be a leading public figure in France in the 19th century, "in private, his refuge was drawing". "Hugo's ink and wash visions of imaginary castles, monsters and seascapes are as poetic as his writing," according to the Royal Academy of Arts. "His works inspired Romantic and Symbolist poets, and many artists including the Surrealists. Vincent van Gogh compared them to 'astonishing things'." For a long time, Hugo showed his drawings only to close friends, even though he ensured their posterity by donating them to France's national library. The works, many made of ink washes, graphite pencil and charcoal, are "rarely on public display and were last seen in the UK over 50 years ago," the academy added. The exhibition of about 70 drawings seeks to address the relationship between Hugo's artistic and literary work. Most were made between 1850 and 1870, the period he was exiled to the island of Guernsey following a coup d'état in December 1851 by Napoleon III. It was while in exile that Hugo completed some of his major works, including "Les Chatiments" (The Castigations) and "Les Miserables". The exhibition tracks his progress from early caricatures and travel drawings to dramatic landscapes and his experiments with abstraction. While his writings were deeply rooted in reality and tackled subjects such as social deprivation and the death penalty, certain drawings are more enigmatic, like "Mushroom" which depicts a giant anthropomorphic toadstool. However the influence of his political beliefs can be seen in "Ecce Lex" (Behold the law), which shows a hanged man. The London exhibition is scheduled to run until 29 June. adm/pdh/rmb/jfx
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.
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
