Spiders, lonely towers, ecstatic octopuses, and gigantic anthropomorphic mushrooms: welcome to the visual world Victor Hugo. While the Les Mis author must have been one of the busiest people of the 19th century, as dramatist, poet, bestselling author, active politician, and hugely controversial public figure, he also found the time to produce art that has attracted admirers as various as the founder of surrealism Andre Breton, Antony Gormley and Vincent van Gogh.
That Hugo’s densely worked drawings will be of considerable historical and cultural interest, and a matter of intense fascination to scholars of the Romantic movement, goes without saying. What remains to be seen is how much an entire exhibition of them will have to offer the rest of us, not least the millions who loved the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and, of course, Les Misérables the musical.
Hugo was a massively contradictory figure, a humanitarian who campaigned against slavery and capital punishment and an instinctive populist who could have taught Donald Trump a thing or two about media manipulation. And this paradoxical quality extends into his art in spades. For all his compulsion to elicit a public reaction from just about everything he did, Hugo never exhibited his drawings, barely allowing anyone beyond his family and circle of intimate friends to see them.
But if his claim that these images were “made in the margins during hours of almost unconscious reverie with what remained of the ink in my pen” creates an expectation of cack-handed scrawlings from which intimations of his private life and the origins of his novels could be deduced, nothing could be further from the truth.
The vast majority of images in this exhibition are “camera-ready”, as they say in publishing, to hit the page as illustrations to some turbulent Romantic novel or epic poetry cycle. The quirky and patently graphic The Town of Viadem Seen through a Spider’s Web (1871) is just waiting for a title and author name to be emblazoned across it. Craggy castles rise out of swirling mists, “vision ships” capsize in terrifying storms, all deftly evoked in idiosyncratic combinations of sepia ink wash, pencil, charcoal, gouache, and masses of thickly matted black ink.
While Hugo had no training in art, he was a dab hand with his chosen materials, overlaying clouds of dark wash with intricate pencil detail, and rubbing over found objects such as pieces of lace to create complex textures that are highly seductive and often appear strikingly ahead of their time.
Jumbled fairytale roofs beneath an ethereal castle make The Town and Castle of Vianden by Moonlight (1871) feel very much of its 19th century moment, but the ravishing combination of textures in the architectural fantasia Hic Clavis, Alias Porta (1850) – likely a representation of Hugo’s mansion on Guernsey where he lived in self-imposed exile for 20 years – is so difficult to pick apart it looks almost abstract. Tremulous shadows appear to drip down the paper, offset by expanses of chalky white gouache, and what looks to be a faux-medieval fireplace, looming out of the centre of the image like some ominous idol.
Looking at The Dead City (1850), with its scratchy blur of buildings beneath an overwhelming black sky, it becomes clear why the surrealist Max Ernst was an admirer of Hugo. It immediately brings to mind one of Ernst’s “grattage” paintings – created by rubbing paint-covered canvas over textured objects – produced nearly a century later.
If much of Hugo’s imagery feels rooted in the early 19th century Romantic era in which he grew up – dark heaths at dusk, medieval alleyways, staircases winding to nowhere – the treatment often looks forward to late 19th century symbolism and even 20th century surrealism. Tight-arsed observational drawings of castles and gothic spires give way to fantasy castles that appear to have been impulsively splashed into position but were actually created using paper stencils – which was neither a shortcut nor Hugo cheating; he could far more easily have done them by hand.
His dancing octopuses have a bonkers surreal eroticism. That giant mushroom with its haunted face peering out of the stem and sinister poisonous connotations could pass for the work of the visionary symbolist Odilon Redon, 40 years Hugo’s junior, while a sheet of anarchic abstract splashes and drips would make Jackson Pollock green with envy.
But the greatest contradiction about Hugo’s art is that while he is considered one of the great writers of humanity, creator of some of the most unforgettable characters in literature, his art is almost entirely devoid of human presence. Perhaps that helps explain why many of the images here don’t seem entirely complete in themselves. They often feel like settings for some yet to be revealed off-scene action; the fact that there are few if any references to his literary works notwithstanding.
If Hugo had never committed a word to paper, he would still be a highly interesting artist, one of those quirky figures dotted through art history who point in many directions, while remaining in their own idiosyncratic furrow. That he also happened to be a titan of global literature, gives his visual art a massive and unescapable extra hinterland – the sense that it exists in a fascinating interzone between art and literature. But you don’t have to be an expert in either area to appreciate these courageous and provocative images. Their uncompromising and uninhibited enjoyment of the fantastic tugs at something that is present in all of us.
‘Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo’ is at the Royal Academy from 21 March until 29 June
