The art of decoration according to Hugo

The sentences of Victor Hugo's poems, novels and plays are so full of phantasmagorical images that his abundant literary work seems to exhaust in words the visions, reveries, mirages and chimeras of his inner visual universe.

It is hard to imagine what else the magician of French literature could have added, with a brush in his hand, to the immense virtual iconography born of his pen. Would Hugo have painted pictures? We often know that he left more than 3,500 drawings in his hand, without considering himself an accomplished artist in this field. But paintings?

The magazine l'Œil lifts the veil on Hugo's work as a painter in order to highlight, it is believed, the poet's pure pictorial work. On the contrary, it is to focus on his most artistically indigent but most impressive plastic aspect in terms of "immersive" experience. The 19th century seen by the 21st!

This is the Victor Hugo decorator whose quasi-baroque talent we are invited to admire here by pushing open the door of the mythical No. 6 on the Place des Vosges. A must-see, it's true, because each room in this theatrical flat is in itself a colourful cabinet of curiosities. But why today?

Because this Gaudi-like temple has just been modernised to ensure a more ergonomic 'user experience' for visitors. And because museums are opening up to a new public. What an artistic emergency.

From Victor Hugo as a painter and decorator, we quickly move on to the DIY designer and recycler and finally to the compulsive bargain hunter. To the point of marvelling at small prosaic details. The art of throwing out the genie with the bathwater by looking at things through the smallest of lenses.

For the French Shakespeare was in truth no more and no less than a 20th century painter lost in the 19th century. His gestural painting, very Action Painting, is Pollock or Kline before Kline and Pollock. His rubbings and imprints announce Max Ernst. And his signed pebbles put Duchamp's status as an undisputed pioneer of modern art into perspective. It is good to be reminded of this when everything seems to emphasise that Hugo rhymes with Damidot.

Who would really want to know if Pollock collected telephone books? Giving a small picture of great men is anything but innocent.

Photo:

- Victor Hugo: Stencil
- Victor Hugo House - Red Room