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Hugo also drew, incessantly. This is the least-known aspect of his work, even in France; in the U.S. it will come as a complete surprise, even to art lovers. It is not known how many drawings Hugo made. About 3,000 survive, shared among various French state collections and a few private ones. From this mass, a distillation of some 100 images has been made for the Drawing Center in downtown New York City by curators Ann Philbin and Florian Rodari. It went on view last week, and it is an amazing show, a splendid (if unscheduled) complement to Robb's biography.
Leonardo da Vinci once advised painters to draw inspiration from random blots and stains on walls, in which the drifting imagination could see landscapes and battle pieces. Most of Hugo's drawn work was dedicated to this idea. From puddled stains and splotches he would summon up the primary images of his imagination--storms, cliffs, caves, brooding castle towers, desolate landscapes, monsters, shipwrecks, Gothic fantasies of every kind. They were provoked, as he put it, by "hours of almost unconscious daydreaming." Together, Hugo's drawings make up one of the most striking testimonies to the image-forming power of the unconscious in all Western art. They don't describe a predetermined image; they allow visions to surface through spontaneous play.
"Any means would do for him," wrote one of his friends, "the dregs of a cup of coffee tossed on old laid paper, the dregs of an inkwell tossed on notepaper, spread with his fingers, sponged up, dried, then taken up with a thick brush or a fine one... Sometimes the ink would bleed through the notepaper, and so on the reverse another vague drawing was born." He would also, when the impulse struck him, use stencils, fingerprints, soot, imprints from ink-soaked lace, stones and fingernails. He would fold the sheets of paper to make Rorschach blots in the wet ink. He worked like an omnipotent child, in a sort of haptic delirium of free association.
The drawings are scratchy, messy, dark and sometimes as fecal as the under-Paris of sewers that he had created in Les Miserables. They are full of the fustian of Romanticism, but one must remember that it was a fustian that he himself had largely created through his own writings, years before. And in many respects, it, and what he said about it, seems almost incredibly forward-looking. Sometimes this is due to the apocalyptic subject matter, seen nearly 150 years later through late 20th century eyes. Hugo's Mushroom, circa 1850, a gigantic fungus looming irrationally up against a dim and devastated-looking landscape, can't help reminding you of atomic disaster, though not even Hugo could have imagined that.
The really new element in Hugo's work was the condition of its making. "Great artists," Hugo wrote, "have an element of chance in their talent, and there is also talent in their chance." Chapter and verse for many a 20th century painter, from the Surrealists to Jackson Pollock. Some of Hugo's taches ("blots" or "stains"), like the undated Abstract Composition, are hauntingly beautiful. It is his surrender to process, to the way in which the nature of the medium is allowed to form the image with the minimum of conscious control, that makes him seem prophetically modern.