Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo

[muriel_volestrangler]

I had no idea he was also an artist.

Victor Hugo is the French equivalent of Shakespeare and Dickens. The inventor of Quasimodo and Jean Valjean is so universal that we absorb his myths even if we have never picked up one of his books. Yet how much do most of us know about Hugo himself, behind the books, the films, the musicals? By dedicating an exhibition to this versatile creator’s visual art, which started with a few caricatures and developed into sublime and surreal masterpieces, the Royal Academy does something unexpectedly moving. It takes you into the secret heart of a man we tend to think of only as a classic.

For instance we discover that Hugo campaigned against the death penalty nearly two centuries ago. His 1854 drawing Ecce Lex (Behold the Law) is a macabre inky portrait of a hanged corpse, part of his doomed campaign to save a condemned murderer called John Tapner. Hugo opposed capital punishment on principle, but a few years later gave permission for this drawing to be made into a print protesting the execution of American anti-slavery activist John Brown. If there was a liberal cause, Hugo threw his huge heart into it.

One of the first drawings you encounter in this sensitively curated show is his sketch of the council chamber in the town hall of Thionville in the north-east of France, after it was left in ruins by the invading Prussian army in 1871. Thus, in his late 60s, he added war artist to his vocations of author and campaigner, and recorded the violence of the Franco-Prussian war. In fact, this disaster for France improved his own life. It led to the fall of the dictator Louis Napoleon, whom Hugo had defied, choosing political exile on Guernsey, where he created some of his most haunting art.

That was his public life. Hugo’s art, however, takes you under his skin, without rules or any audience except himself, absolutely free and dauntingly creative. You can feel the isolation and soul-searching in his 1850 sketch Causeway, which dwells on nothing more than a bleak rocky causeway, perhaps his road to exile. In a drawing beside it he ponders the woody morass of a soaking breakwater in Jersey – the first Channel Island to which he fled.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/mar/18/astonishing-things-the-drawings-of-victor-hugo-review-royal-academy

More of his pictures: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2025/mar/01/castles-in-the-sky-the-fantastical-drawings-of-author-victor-hugo-in-pictures