The Wall Street Journal quotes Marva in an article about Christie’s 2012 Paris auction of 500 artworks and objects from Victor Hugo’s family
March 30, 2012 7:09 p.m. ET
Victor Hugo, who wrote the famous, often-adapted novels “Les Misérables” and “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,” called his visual artworks “random pen strokes thrown more or less maladroitly on paper by a man who has other things to do.” But the author drew some 3,000 mostly ink-on-paper pieces, many dark and experimental.
A forthcoming auction of 500 artworks and objects from the family’s cache shows how Hugo’s artwork influenced his descendants. The items are expected to fetch some $1.3 million when they hit the block Wednesday at the Christie’s salesroom in Paris.
Hugo (1802-85) sketched frequently during his travels and his exile from France from 1851 to 1870, when he lived in Brussels and the English Channel Islands. The author drew on cards: One 5-by-8-inch example from 1855, included in the sale, pictures an eerie plume of smoke creeping toward a small rendering of a landscape painting that’s propped up on a shelf of sinewy, birch-like letters. They read: “VICTOROGUH.” The piece is expected to sell for between $67,000 and $110,000.
“His work got more and more imaginative and fantastical during his exile,” says Hugo scholar Marva A. Barnett, a professor at the University of Virginia and editor of “Victor Hugo on Things That Matter: A Reader,” published in 2009. “He experimented in ways that a lot of people at the time weren’t. He painted with coffee. He would soak a piece of lace in ink and press it on the paper to get that pattern.” Then Hugo would add eyes to make the imprints look like skulls.
The sale includes works of Hugo descendants as well. His great-grandson Jean was a painter active in 1920s-era Surrealist circles in Paris. Ms. Barnett says that Jean introduced Hugo’s then-little-known ink drawings to the likes of Surrealist masters Jean Cocteau and André Breton. Jean Hugo’s own Surrealist-inflected paintings will be for sale at Christie’s too. “The Metamorphoses” from 1929, is expected to fetch $40,000 to $66,000.
—Rachel Wolff