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Article: Victor Hugo: Drawn to the Void.(artist)
- Article from:
- Art in America
- Article date:
- March 1, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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France's 19th-century literary giant, exiled for two decades, cultivated a brooding but startlingly inventive graphic-art "avocation. "International shows are now bringing to light the full range of his proto-abstract experiments with technique and materials.
I'm very happy and very proud that you should choose to think kindly of what I call my pen-and-ink drawings. I've 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. It keeps me amused between two verses.
--Victor Hugo
Letter to Charles Baudelaire, Apr. 29,1860
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