The poetic drawings of Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo was a prominent public figure in 19th-century France. His books Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame were printed all over the world, making him a celebrity during his lifetime. As a poet and politician, during his nearly twenty-year exile in the Channel Islands, he became the symbol of the ideals of the French Republic: equality and liberty. Outside of public life, his “refuge” was drawing. His imaginary world, rarely explored before, is the central theme of this exhibition, which presents Hugo’s visions in ink and watercolor: images of nonexistent castles, monsters and seascapes that are as poetic as his writing. This exhibition traces Hugo’s interest in art, from his caricatures and travel drawings, to his landscapes so charged with symbolic emotion, to his most original experiments bordering on abstraction.