Shadows of a Hand: The Drawings of Victor Hugo

The Drawing Center presented Shadows of a Hand: The Drawings of Victor Hugo, the first museum exhibition of Victor Hugo's (1802–1885) drawings in the United States. The approximately 100 drawings included in the exhibition were selected and curated by Ann Philbin, director of The Drawing Center, and Florian Rodari, guest curator and art historian, from the collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Maison de Victor Hugo, the Musée Victor Hugo de Villequier, the Louvre, the Hugo family, and various private collections in France and the United States.

Hugo was the towering figure of nineteenth-century French letters; his literary production was prodigious. As a poet, novelist, dramatist, journalist, critic, political activist, and leader of the romantic movement in France, he loomed over literature and French cultural life for the major part of the century. Some works of note include the preface to his 1827 play Cromwell (which served as the manifesto to the French romantic movement), the opening performances to his 1830 play Hernani (which were attended by riotous demonstrations by partisans and opponents of the new drama), his fiction such as Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Les Misérables (1862), and Les Travailleurs de la Mer (1866)—all of which reveal a humanitarian interest in the problems and suffering of the common man. Alongside his vast literary production, Hugo also produced a large and significant corpus of drawings. He was an inveterate draftsman and drew obsessively throughout his life. His drawings may seem at first to be mere marginalia to his writing, and yet the body of work numbers in the thousands of sheets and the drawings were made with a diligence of purpose rare in many artists.

He developed certain subjects and themes in depth and gave pictorial reality to images evoked in his writing. He experimented with a variety of techniques, including frottage, stenciling, ink blotting, scraping, imprinting, collage, and cutout. He also experimented with various materials and combinations of materials, including mixtures of ink, coffee, sepia, and soot. He worked in a variety of scales, some of the drawings being quite large. He employed various procedures, developing images out of abstract blots and using chance methods; he combined written language with pictorial space; he designed furniture and interiors; and he produced an important series of abstract drawings that have clear affinities to post-war American abstract artists such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline.

The Drawing Center's exhibition focused on Hugo's prescient relationship to art movements of the twentieth century, particularly surrealism and abstract expressionism. In order to illustrate this connection, the focal point of the selection was on Hugo's freely executed wash drawings of landscapes, on the tache drawings where the artist employed staining techniques, and on drawings in which he used stencils, glue, and pieces of lace as drawing implements.