French writer Victor Hugo is famous for penning The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Les Miserables, but less known is his work as an illustrator — now the subject of a new exhibition in London.
“Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo,” which opened at the Royal Academy of Arts on Friday, traces Hugo’s passion for illustration, 140 years after his death.
The exhibition’s notes say that while the Romantic author and politician came to be a leading public figure in France in the 19th century, “in private, his refuge was drawing.”
Photo: AP
“Hugo’s ink and wash visions of imaginary castles, monsters and seascapes are as poetic as his writing,” the Royal Academy of Arts said. “His works inspired Romantic and Symbolist poets, and many artists including the Surrealists. Vincent van Gogh compared them to ‘astonishing things.’”
For a long time, Hugo showed his drawings only to close friends, even though he ensured their posterity by donating them to France’s national library.
The works, many made of ink washes, graphite pencil and charcoal, are “rarely on public display and were last seen in the UK over 50 years ago,” the academy said.
The exhibition of about 70 drawings seeks to address the relationship between Hugo’s artistic and literary work.
Most were made between 1850 and 1870, the period he was exiled to the island of Guernsey following a coup d’etat in December 1851 by Napoleon III.
It was while in exile that Hugo completed some of his major works, including Les Chatiments (The Castigations) and Les Miserables. The exhibition tracks his progress from early caricatures and travel drawings to dramatic landscapes and his experiments with abstraction.
While his writings were deeply rooted in reality and tackled subjects such as social deprivation and the death penalty, certain drawings are more enigmatic, such as Mushroom, which depicts a giant anthropomorphic toadstool.
However the influence of his political beliefs can be seen in Ecce Lex (Behold the Law), which shows a hanged man.
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military. The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
The Philippine Coast Guard yesterday said it deployed aircraft to issue radio warnings to a Chinese research ship in a disputed area of the South China Sea “swarming” with vessels from Beijing’s so-called maritime militia. The research vessel Xiang Yang Hong 33 (向陽紅33), which is capable of supporting submersible craft, was operating near a reef in the contested Spratly Islands (Nansha Islands, 南沙群島), which Taiwan also claims, the Philippine Coast Guard said. The Chinese ship was deploying a service boat toward the Spratly’s Iroquois Reef on Wednesday when it was spotted by a coast guard plane, “confirming ongoing unauthorized [marine scientific research]
RSS