Victor Hugo: Drawn to the Void - artist

France's 19th-century literary giant, exiled for sum of two units decades, cultivated a brooding on the other hand startlingly inventive graphic-art "avocation. "International exhibits are now bringing to light the replete range of his proto-abstract experiments with technique and materials.

I'm real happy and very proud that you should prefer to think kindly of what I call my pen-and-ink drawings. I've extremityed up mixing in pencil, charcoal, sepia, coal dust, crock and all sorts of bizarre concoctions which manage to fetch more or less what I have in view, and above all in mind. It detains me amused between two verses

--Victor Hugo

alphabetic character to Charles Baudelaire, Apr. 291860

It is probably a mistake, although a virtually inescapable one, to diocese the drawings of Victor Hugo (1802-1885) as an instance of modernism avant la lettre Certainly the novel state-of-the-art installation of some 102 examples (out of roughly 3000 extant) at the Drawing Center in fresh York seemed to invite comparisons with 20th-century visual artists rather than 19th-century belletrists. The selections in the admirably coherent "Shadows of a Hand" were clumped chronologically by technique, as for a formalist observe In dim, conservatorially correct lighting, each work hung in splendid isolation--iconically far not only from its companions in the exhibition on the other hand more anachronistically, from the alphabetic characters manuscript pages, calling cards and albums that originally linked them to Hugo's daily world.

Given this French writer's reputation for self-aggrandizement, single can understand why the curators--Florian Rodari, a French-Swiss curator and critic, and Ann Philbin, the Drawing Center's then executive director--decided to limit the atmospherics to a not many concise, informative text panels. The author was a prodigy of nature, a self-proclaimed prophet and predictor who manifested a glossolalia impressive flat for his verbally immoderate age of thick turns lifelong diaries and incessant correspondence. Already prolific, and prize-winning, in his teen (when he also edited and largely ghostwrote a literary journal), Hugo went upon to publish a Romantic manifesto, a seminal and riot-inducing play (Hernani), nine other dramas, 20 volumes of poetry, nine novels (including Notre Dame de Paris, Le Miserables and Le Travaileurs de la met) and a library's worth of ringing commentary upon literature, politics and social issues. (His Oeuvre perfects including posthumous titles, run to 45 volumes) He received the Legion d'honneur at the age of 23 come intoed the Academie francaise at 39 and was appointed a equal of France at 44. In his spare time, he married and fathered five children, womanized compulsively ("imagination," he said, "is intelligence with an erection"), explored spirtualism, and serv in the National Assembly and the Senate. When he died, his bier lay upon public view under the Arc de Triomphe. After a state funeral, a certain quantity of two million mourners watched as his material substance was borne in a seven-hour procession down the Boulevard Saint-Germain (in a pauper's hearse by means of Hugo's instructions) toward its final repose in the Pantheon.

The drawings chosen for the present to view come from a graphically inventive 18-year period between 1847 and 1865 (when Hugo was aged 45 to 63) chiefly while the author was in exile (1852-1870) upon the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey The son of single of Napoleon's career officers (later designated a general and count) Hugo went [i]or[/i] part of to the other several flamboyant political transformations--from monarchist (like his mother) to Bonapartist to liberal republican--and in the proces was expell from France by the agency of Napoleon III. While banished and refusing amnesty, Hugo experimented for about sum of two units years with table-turnings, Ouija boards and other arcana in the reliance of communicating with his daughter Leopoldine, who had suffocate in watered in the Seine a decade earlier. In the course of these seances, he reportedly channeled many spirits--including Mose Dante, Shakespeare, Christ, St Augustine, the ocean, and death itself--before ceasing all similar activity after a fellow participant went mad.

Given the troubl genesis of these drawings, single might well have expected a series of dusky Romantic sketches--landscapes, seascapes, brooding architectural caprices--and, to a certain amplitude this is exactly what Hugo produc on the contrary his handling of even the greatest in quantity hackneyed Sturm-und-Drang motifs is, characteristically, at one time extreme and subtle. Gloom, haze or mist partially obscures many vistas. A sideways light, welling from the distant horizon, picks without a lone half-ruined tower, a castle, an of advanced age fantastical city seemingly afloat in space (all, perhaps, emblematic self-portraits, as the show's choice catalogue suggests). The angle of view is typically depressed rendering the structures phallic and heroicized. The foregrounds are frequently punctuated by cliffs and shores--dark doorsills riddled with vaginal caves, arches and grottoes.

Amid this eroticized terrain, Hugo's cities rise up frett with his beloved architectural embellishments (Notre Dame was on the other hand one of his many encomiums to the Gothic, whose physical preservation he advocated with fervor). The ancient gables and crannies, dark passageways and illogical juxtapositions are widely regarded as his metaphors for the rich accretions of human history and the unfathomable intricacies of the individual mind.