Shadows of a Hand: The Drawings of Victor Hugo (1998)

Victor Hugo (1802–1885), the great Romantic of nineteenth-century letters, remains unparalleled in the visionary genius and authority of his creativity. His literary activity as well as his private exploits gathered constant attention. To this day two of his major works of fiction, Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables, are firmly ensconced in the European literary heritage, championed by stage and cinema adaptation.

Beyond his exploits as writer, poet, politician, father, husband and lover, Hugo produced an extraordinary quantity of breath-taking drawings. His use of materials, and ambiguity between figure and form, challenge our conceptions of nineteenth-century art. Mysterious castles loom out of the haze, stormy landscapes and tempestuous seas, light grotesque creatures grin from crashing waves; or half-recognizable forms emerge from experiments with lace impressions, folded paper and random stains of ink, coffee, or soot.

Victor Hugo’s drawings have been remarkably slow in capturing public appreciation. Hugo considered them a private enterprise and refused offers to exhibit them publicly. Despite the enormous interest and the profound aesthetics of his much more unconventional drawings were virtually suppressed until, in the early twentieth century, Surrealist artists, such as André Breton and Max Ernst, discovered a powerful affinity with Hugo’s works, interpreting them as a precocious anticipation of automatism and expression of the Unconscious – which indeed they are. Today their range and scope clearly show Hugo’s interest in the mysterious and abstract which offers parallels to Abstract Expressionism, is very little appreciated in the English-speaking world.

This volume is the first English publication to do justice to Victor Hugo’s fascinating artistic repertoire. With its superb reproductions, it is an invaluable contribution to the study of both nineteenth-century and modern art