Victor Hugo: Drawn to the Void - artist

Art in America, March, 1999 by Richard Vine

The feel of this formal eclecticism (for the techniques were not, strictly speaking, unprecedented) is not teleological--in the manner of Picasso and Braque racing to perfect their Cubist breakthroughs--but expansive and random, almost desultory. Or so Hugo would have us believe. In his 1860 letter to Baudelaire, and elsewhere, he insisted on distinguishing these private doodlings, these mere graphic trifles, from his true vocation: his epochal public writing. (During his exile, Hugo reportedly produced 100 lines of verse or 20 pages of prose every morning.) Although he had set up a fully equipped studio in Paris, and kept himself well stocked with materials on Jersey and Guernsey, he preferred to describe himself as simply tossing off these pictures (which were often enclosed in letters or given as gifts)--unclotting his pen and his imagination between bouts of bardic verbal composition. Untrained (though he had drawn seriously since 1830 and felt competent enough to design interiors, furniture and architectural details), he produced these "vagaries of the unknowing hand," he said, to distract himself, to amuse his friends (many of whom just happened to be important writers, artists and critics) and to entertain children.

In his lifetime, according to Pierre Georgel's catalogue essay, Hugo sanctioned only a few public exposures of what the poet himself coyly called "these mediocre pen-and-ink lines put down on paper more or less awkwardly and any old how by a man who has other things to do." (Prints derived from drawings he had given to friends did, however, turn up fairly often in popular journals and in portfolios documenting multi-artist collections.) The artist once consigned four works to Alfred Marvey, an esteemed etcher, to be prepared as lottery prizes in 1847. In 1860, Hugo's brother-in-law, the engraver Paul Chenay, persuaded him to authorize a print version of Ecce (1854), a stark gallows scene originally lamenting the execution of a murderer on Guernsey, now issued as a protest against the execution of the abolitionist John Brown in the U.S. This was followed in 1862 by an album of landscape images with an introduction by France's reigning Aestheticist critic, Theophile Gautier, who had earlier published an admiring article on Hugo's art in La Presse.

The volume failed commercially but garnered esteem from tastemakers like the Goncourt brothers. At least one major critic, Philippe Burty, wrote that the drawings portended a revolutionary change in artistic sensibility such as actually occurred a year later at the Salon des Refuses. As the cult of admiration grew for this self-styled "artist in spite of himself," many unauthorized reproductions were published, particularly in Victor Hugo illustre, where, for example, 36 drawings Hugo had bound into the manuscript for Les Travailleurs de la ruer first appeared.

Hugo willed his papers and drawings to the Bibliotheque Nationale. In 1888, three years after his death, the first show of his work was organized by longtime friend Paul Meurice for the Galerie Georges Petit. This much-publicized event, inaugurated by the president of France, led to the founding in 1903 of the Maison de Victor Hugo, where under Meurice's guidance several hundred of the (mostly more representational) drawings went on display.