Victor Hugo's Artwork

[adrock3215]

I stumbled across these curious works by Victor Hugo on Wikipedia. They struck me as strange when compared with his fiction. Indeed, the entry in Wikipedia says:

It is reported that Hugo often drew with his left hand or without looking at the page, or during Spiritualist séances, in order to access his unconscious mind, a concept later popularized by Sigmund Freud.

Anyone have thoughts on this art and how it compares with his literature?

Edited March 27, 2008 by adrock3215

[aequalsa]

I stumbled across these curious works by Victor Hugo on Wikipedia. They struck me as strange when compared with his fiction. Indeed, the entry in Wikipedia says:

Anyone have thoughts on this art and how it compares with his literature?

It might be referential to his literature. The octopus immediately made me think of 'Toilers of the Sea.' The view of the city brought the view from notredame to mind which he describes extensively in 'The hunchback.' Do you know if they were random or connected to his writing?

[Tenure]

Ah! I love Victor Hugo's artwork. I stumbled upon it a while ago. It's that Octopus one I really love. I mean, look at how he's used really-water ink to create what is a murky, slimey, inky creature. It's perfect.

Artists can say what they like about how they created their artwork 'tapping into their conciousness', but to me, these works look like the creations sprung out of the tools used to create them. They show order coming out of chaos, a beautiful structure forming out of something as unwieldy as ink.

(I should note here, I have a bias for ink-based work, whether it be etching, painted [as above], penned or, even, just a biro pen. I think ink is the superior medium for any creation of visual art. It is so versatile, but it requires real skill to use properly.)

I know some people are going to label these as having malevolent sense of life, simply because they are dark in colour, but I think this allows the subtly of the creations to really shine through.

[Tensorman]

It might be referential to his literature. The octopus immediately made me think of 'Toilers of the Sea.' The view of the city brought the view from notredame to mind which he describes extensively in 'The hunchback.' Do you know if they were random or connected to his writing?

At least some of them were connected to his writing. The octopus is indeed an illustration in Les travailleurs de la mer (and that scene was also the inspiration for the fight with the octopus in Jules Verne's Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, IIRC Verne even made a reference to Hugo that in his text). I have the complete novels by Hugo and they contain many of his illustrations. They are not great art, his drawings are a bit amateurish, but I wouldn't like to miss them. Apparently they are not in the translated versions. In Les misérables some of his illustrations are in fact funny caricatures of some of the characters in the book. I just browsed his Notre Dame de Paris, but I found no illustrations there (but I'll look more carefully later).

[intellectualammo]

Ah! I love Victor Hugo's artwork. I stumbled upon it a while ago.

And I just stumbled upon his pen and ink drawings during my self-directed learnings a night ago when reading a book written by Samuel Edwards titled Victor Hugo: A Tumultuous Life. It's said that he did many of the frontispieces to his novels, but I haven't seen any of those that I know of, but one particularily that I liked that I have seen of his, not mentioned at all in this thread, is his pen and ink drawing titled "The Dream" which is described in the book as "a man's hand and bare forearm groping upward into space through a sea of dark, forbidding clouds."

I know some people are going to label these as having malevolent sense of life, simply because they are dark in colour, but I think this allows the subtly of the creations to really shine through.

In the caption underneath "The Dream", the author says that this one is just "one of many reflecting his melancholy and sense of foreboding." This drawing of his must have been of some significance to the author of this book, because when I was undressing it's jacket last night, the hand from the drawing is actually imprinted into the cover, which was such a pleasant treasure for me to have discovered buried underneath.

Edited September 25, 2008 by intellectualammo