Astonishing Things, the RA show’s title comes from a comment Vincent van Gogh made on seeing Victor Hugo’s drawings, thus placing him in good company. These tiny to mid-scale works on paper are encrusted with oceans of imagination and filtered through the screen of a pervasive 19th-century Romanticism. Hugo’s watercolour drawings and sketches are pretexts for working through ideas…. sombre castles, seaside shipwrecks, and ideational or abstract unfinished scenarios. Reverie slips over into visualization, all this transcribed unconsciously. It is as if Hugo were in a dialogue with the infinite, or les immortels. He is known to have held over 200 séances to communicate with famous personages from the past, with animals, and the spirit world while in exile at Hauteville House on the island of Guernsey for some 20 years.
One of France’s greatest writers, poets, and thinkers, immortalized in bronze by Auguste Rodin, a Royalist, Victor Hugo only had his first exhibition posthumously at Galerie Georges Petit in Paris (1888). Always the progressive, a reformer who advocated for the abolition of capital punishment, Hugo was often at odds with the powers that be. He helped some achieve their power only to be deceived and move away. Ecce Lex (1854) has a singular, morbid image of a hanging man in pen and brown ink, John Tapner, who was imprisoned in Guernsey. Paul Chenay’s aquatint John Brown (1861), after Hugo’s image of a hanged man, was printed and distributed in support of the abolition of the death penalty. Hugo’s hanged man, with its simple silhouette in darkness, carries a deafening finality.
The sketches often achieved using the writer’s basic materials – brown ink, pastel, or pencil to which he added other elements- are scenic transpositions or realizations with an immediacy and graphic ambiguity that fuels the viewer’s imagination. We fill in the spaces with our own imaginings, exactly what he intends. And the art fuels the writings and vice versa. It’s a big machine, Hugo’s all-powerful mind, as active as Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely’s, except the mechanisms were largely invisible, not sculptural. Les Misérables (1862) and Toilers of the Sea (1866), two of Hugo’s immensely popular novels, illustrated by Gustave Doré, were written in exile.
Fine, febrile, agile, and agitated, these line and brown ink works on view are small to mid-sized and effortlessly capture scenarios. The mistakes and ink spills, while writing or not, would evolve into visuals, using his physical hands, or feathers dipped in ink, or by folding, and so they metamorphose in that space of transition… into remarkable windows into the workings of a great mind. A near-photographic fade-in, fade-out intensity agitates our way of seeing in Causeway (1850).
One of the largest images in the RA show, Mushroom (1850,) rises up and stands like a kind of conscious monument or non-human presence. The Town of Vianden, Seen through Spider’s Web (1871), with its distant city view, likewise suggests nature has a consciousness and is looking in on civilization. Indeed, civilization seems like something temporary that may disappear under the forces of nature and the Divine. Octopus (1864-66) is an affirmation of life, another species! The suggestion is that Victor Hugo was a proto-environmentalist.
Plant Eye (1859) has something of the great French symbolist artist of this era, Odilon Redon. Is it an eye, or is it a planet, or does it have to be anything? The Shade of the Machineel Tree 91856) – a skull in the earth with tree outgrowth could have been made by Odilon Redon or Edvard Munch.
The most fun works are not the haunting, imaginary castles or architectural depictions with dark Victorian atmospheres but the blots, spatters, smatters and taches. We see this in the superb Taches and Silhouettes of a Castle (1856) or Tache-Planetes (ca. 1850). Tache with Circular Imprint (1864-69), with its succession of automatiste, dream-like written actions, has layers, like a writer’s unconscious reflections. Victor Hugo’s art, though he never considered it to be important, has an ongoing relevance. The automatiste taches resemble Hugo’s unconscious séance notes (of which we know very little) with their interest in the infinite, the occult, and dream association, when they were transcribed make his writing a prototype for the surrealist’s art and even automatic writing. Some examples include Robert Desnos’ surreal environments, Max Ernst’s frottages or André Masson’s automatic drawing. It’s no surprise that André Breton, in the first 1924 Surrealist manifesto, stated, “Hugo is Surrealist when he isn’t stupid.” 1
In the sublime Copeau (wood shaving) for Toilers of the Sea (ca. 1864-65), texts written by hand move hastily off in all directions. The lines are like assemblage elements, transcriptions from the very active mind of a great writer. What more evidence of the sheer speed of Hugo’s ways of visualizing thoughts do you need? Copeau even has the words, “A bruler” written over one section, so this was probably never intended to be curated into immortality. Ashes to ashes…
Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo is as good as it gets. Hugo is never framed by intention. Invention makes the storyline, word by word, image by image – and they bleed into one another. Fantastic!
Words by John K Grande, photos by Sara Faith © Artlyst 2025
Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo, 21 March – 29 June 2025, Royal Academy of Arts
1. William Gaunt, The Surrealists (London: Thames & Hudson, 1972), p. 7
John K. Grande has contributed articles to Artforum, British Journal of Photography, Burlington Magazine, Public Art Review, Arte.Es, Art on Paper, Public Art Review and Landscape Architecture. His books include Balance: Art and Nature (Black Rose Books, 1994), Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists (SUNY Press, New York, 2004) and Art SpaceEcology (U. Chicago / BRB, 2019).
Art Space Ecology; Two Views Twenty Interviews, Black Rose Books / U. of Chicago, 2018)