Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In September 1843, Victor Hugo was on a sunlit walk while travelling with his mistress in the Pyrenees. He stepped into a caf\u00e9 to rest, picked up a newspaper and read of a tragic accident in Normandy. On a calm day on the Seine, a sudden squall capsized a rowing boat carrying a young couple. She, 19 and pregnant, was pulled down by her heavy dress; he leapt into the water to save her; both drowned.Hugo\u2019s favourite child L\u00e9opoldine was already buried when he learned that day of her death. Devastated, he wrote little and published nothing for the next decade. But he did draw: as imaginatively, sensuously, eccentrically as one would expect, and with a naturally graceful line and compositional flair. Seventy superb pieces feature in the Royal Academy\u2019s Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo. Doubly appealing, the exhibition offers both biographical revelation and a scarcely known, very beautiful chapter in 19th-century graphic art in its heyday of Daumier and Dor\u00e9.Hugo had always sketched \u2014 3,000 drawings survive. After 1843, however, he became a draughtsman of real originality and expressive depths, working in fine pencil, smoky charcoal, wet inks, gouache and coloured washes, repeatedly creating images of drowning and submerged worlds. For \u201cThe Wreck\u201d, he dragged the feathered end of an ink-dipped quill across the page to depict overpowering waves. \u201cCity on the Rhine\u201d is flooded in brown wash, the buildings hardly visible. The whole sheet for \u201cTaches-Plan\u00e8tes\u201d was soaked in water and splodged with pools of ink and stencilled circles.Sometimes these works appear to be spontaneous explorations, paper randomly stained, blotted, streaked, but the most refined examples combine fluidity with intricate structure. Composed of many layers, the detailed tower of the dread \u201cLa Tour des Rats\u201d \u2014 a Rhineland bastion where by legend a ruler burnt to death the poor, who returned as rats and devoured him \u2014 is dashed with teeming rain, evoked by pulling an inky cloth across the paper. Pen, ink, pencil, crayon and charcoal imitate stone and wood in the impenetrable interior \u201cHic Clavis, alias porta\u201d (Here the key, elsewhere the door) \u2014 an allegory for the claustrophobia of grief.Throughout, you feel immersed in a phantasmagoria of crumbling edifices and fog-shrouded Gothic remnants, evoking the twilit nostalgic sensibility of Hugo\u2019s novels. The central room especially, devoted to Hugo\u2019s obsession with castles, conjures The Hunchback of Notre-Dame\u2019s elegiac romanticism: towers, turrets, crenellations emerge as a ghostly vision in \u201cThe Castle with the Angel\u201d; in white gouache in the nocturne \u201cLandscape with a Castle on a Cliff\u201d; through purple washes in \u201cThe Town of Vianden, with Stone Cross\u201d. A single looming figure is a hanged man, \u201cEcce Lex\u201d \u2014 since Hugo\u2019s 1829 polemic The Last Day of a Condemned Man, he campaigned against capital punishment.In silvery light glowers Hugo\u2019s largest, most ambitious drawing, \u201cThe Castle with the Cross\u201d (captured here as an etching by Fortun\u00e9 Louis-M\u00e9aulle), a fortress with weathered textures enclosing a labyrinthine medieval city, studded with black shadows, facing an elaborate crucifix.But if Gothic fantasy reigns, every now and then some experimental mixed-media curiosity \u2014 a castle and winding stair imprinted with coloured lace in \u201cLes Orientales\u201d, a postage stamp collaged into \u201cTaches and Silhouette of a Castle\u201d \u2014 aligns Hugo instead with the 20th-century avant-garde.Untrained, untethered by academic convention, he can be purely abstract \u2014 the flurry of ink blotches \u201cTwilight, stubborn, black, hideous\u201d \u2014 or darkly metamorphosing like the surrealists. A universe becomes a black pupil in \u201cPlanet-Eye\u201d. Finger marks are blank heads surveying an abyss in \u201cInk-blackened Page with Half-moon and Fingerprints\u201d. In a stunning scale reversal, a giant arachnid hovers above a minuscule city in \u201cThe Town of Vianden Seen Through a Spider\u2019s Web\u201d.This is not to claim Hugo was a modernist in waiting. On the contrary, he was a medievalist, seeking in Gothic spirituality and ornament a refuge from the industrialising 19th century. In this sense he was an internal exile, cloistered in medieval imagining, even before he became in 1851 an actual political exile, opposing Napoleon III\u2019s autocratic Second Empire.Until Napoleon\u2019s regime collapsed in 1870, Hugo lived in Guernsey. From a lookout at the top of his house, he wrote: \u201cI watch the flow being born, expiring, reborn, and the gulls cutting through the air. The ships in the wind open their wingspans, and look in the distance like large figures strolling on the sea.\u201d The vista contributed to the drawings\u2019 floating sensations and hybrid forms \u2014 one sketchbook brims with an orchestra of gargoyle-like human-animal musicians \u2014 and, when he returned to novel-writing, to Les Mis\u00e9rables (1862), suffused with drowning images, and his homage to the island Toilers of the Sea (1866).The final room connects the Guernsey novel \u2014 story of Gilliatt, a fisherman battling to rescue an engine from a shipwreck and thus win his beloved \u2014 with drawings, including the black vortex \u201cThe Vision Ship, or The Last Struggle\u201d, and the sublimely lovely \u201cOctopus\u201d, a single ink stain brushed into contours of body and limbs curling into the initials V H. Hiding in \u201cthe most beautiful azure of the limpid water\u201d, this creature \u2014 \u201cdevil-fish . . . a glutinous mass possessed of a will . . . glue filled with hatred\u201d \u2014 entraps Gilliatt.Hugo professed himself optimistic, predicting a war-free 20th century and explaining Les Mis\u00e9rables as a \u201cprogress from evil to good, from injustice to justice\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009night to day\u201d. The drawings, made \u201cduring hours of almost unconscious reverie with what remained of the ink in my pen\u201d, are emotionally varied, expressing wonder, fear, loss.In \u201cMushroom\u201d, an enormous green and red fungus with eerie peering face rises above a destroyed landscape, uncannily anticipating nuclear apocalypse, not peace. In \u201cThe Shade of the Manchineel Tree\u201d, the toxic tree \u2014 merely standing beneath it burns the skin \u2014 casts an inky skull as its reflection and double, twinning growth and death. An inscription sets the scene in the Pyrenees \u201cbreathing heat like the mouth of an oven\u201d, where a man shelters only to find his sanctuary fatal, as Hugo did in the caf\u00e9 when he discovered L\u00e9opoldine had drowned.Hugo never exhibited his drawings, although they were known and praised in French romantic circles: Delacroix admired them; Th\u00e9ophile Gautier wrote that Hugo \u201cexcels in blending the chiaroscuro effects of Goya with the architectural terror of Piranesi\u201d. That implies, though, a strategised aesthetic, whereas for Hugo a pleasure was freedom of style, giving form to dreams unconstrained by narrative demands. To Baudelaire, he explained: \u201cI\u2019ve ended up mixing in pencil, charcoal, sepia, coal dust, soot and all sorts of bizarre concoctions which manage to convey more or less what I have in view, and above all in mind.\u201d To wander into that mind\u2019s eye at the Royal Academy is a rare delight.To June 29, royalacademy.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In September 1843, Victor Hugo was on a sunlit walk while travelling with his mistress in the Pyrenees. He stepped into a caf\u00e9 to rest, picked up a newspaper and read of a tragic accident in Normandy. On a calm day on the Seine,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":249896,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-249895","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249895"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249897,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249895\/revisions\/249897"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/249896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}