Victor Hugo: Drawn to the Void - artist

Art in America, March, 1999 by Richard Vine

An eerie stillness reigns in these scenes. Human figures, if they appear at all, are minuscule--suspended in an immensity between the stony vestiges of civilization and the sweep of raw nature. Distinctly absent are the urban masses of Hugo's most famous novels, and gone with them is his usual polemicism. Although some images illustrate a passage of narrative, they all seem fervidly internal, obsessed with the rapport between the self and the objective world, the "I" and the "not-I." Movement and implied sound enter this pictorial universe primarily through Hugo's studies of coastlines and waves--and especially of shipwrecks, which in his book L'Homme qui rit, the catalogue tells us, he associates explicitly with the fate of mankind.

The most representational of Hugo's drawings have a tendency to bleed off into abstraction, both at the image edges and, within the scene, at the very places where we might expect the contours to be sharpest. Other deliberate ruptures of illusion include the intrusion of initials or full names--usually his own, sometimes those of his longtime mistress, the actress Juliette Drouet. Occasionally, this seemingly egomaniacal practice derives from the drawing's use as a calling card or as a typical 19th-century device for commemorating a family name. More often, it is laden with grander implications.

In an 1855 work, for example, the gigantic initials VH and JD, as elaborately intertwined as the illicit lovers' lives, float over Marine Terrace, Hugo's large, four-square family house on Jersey--the white pile he shared with his wife, and detested for its austere "Methodism." (Some readers may be pleased to know that Madame Hugo, early in the marriage, had her own dalliance with the literary critic Charles Sainte-Beuve, who wrote an 1834 novel titled Volupte about their affair. Thereafter, she effectively granted Hugo his sexual freedom; it was Juliette who frequently bemoaned his libertine ways.) In Two Castles in a Landscape (1847), the eponymous buildings (which Hugo in an attached script describes as "dark giants ready for the fight") each form a shadowy, site-dominating "H." This is the signal letter not only of Hugo's surname but also, as a catalogue entry notes in regard to the image of a ship thrust sideways against two vertical rocks, a metonym for "Homme (Man), Hero (Hero) and Humanite (Humanity)." Hugo placed Octopus with the Initials VH (ca. 1866) at the end of his manuscript for Les Tronvailleurs de la met, where the monster of the deep (which merges traits of octopus and squid) is characterized as female, though she would seem to have a powerful kinship with the author--lurking underwater (i.e., in the subconscious), capable of grasping in all directions, and escaping capture behind clouds of ink.

Even in his relatively conventional works, Hugo's procedure was, according to an account given by his son Charles, distinctly unorthodox. Beginning anywhere on the page, evolving his first marks into a fully realized detail, then expanding outward to elaborate the whole composition, Hugo boldly inverted the classical method of composition. In many other works, something even more radical happens. (Romanticism, we should remember, was a species of artistic revolt, both thematic and formal.) While Hugo's prime medium remains metallogallic ink, which gives a coloristic effect that Robert Hughes has called "fecal," he also sparingly incorporates areas of brighter hue, along with more somber and unconventional materials--soot, coffee, cigar ash, etc. His touch becomes improvisational, his impulses freely experimental. He practices tachism, expanding the suggestiveness of random drips and pours--by titling and by implement--into arresting patterns and images. He uses blotting to achieve diffusive effects of light and depth; works multiple fingerprints into pictorial forms; does pliage (folding) with results that anticipate Rorschach tests; drops ink-soaked metallic lace on the paper surface (sometimes letting the tracery stand, sometimes surrounding it with illustrational detail); makes cutouts and employs stencils that echo the value-reversing contrasts of photographic negatives (with which his sons Charles and Francois-Victor were then experimenting); and occasionally attaches diverse elements to the sheets in a kind of proto-collage. Whatever the technique of the moment, Hugo shifts freely between representation and pure abstraction, sometimes combining the two. And he does so while working independently, half a century before the official birth of abstract art.