Blistering barnacles, Tintin, I want to be an abstract artist
Comic creator regretted his cowardice during 1940s Nazi occupation of Belgium
PARIS // The creator of the comic cartoon character Tintin pined to be taken seriously as an artist, and was deeply ashamed of his passivity during the Nazi occupation of Belgium.
Now Herge, an exhibition that opens today in Paris, aims to lift some of the mystery that surrounds the enigmatic Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi. Remi, who wrote under the pen name Herge – his initials reversed – lived in the shadow of his boy hero. The exhibition shows how the runaway success of the young reporter’s adventures became a blessing and a curse for Herge, frustrating his hopes of being seen as an abstract painter.
The exhibition, the biggest retrospective of the artist to be assembled, does not gloss over his wartime work for a collaborationist Belgian newspaper.
Curator Jerome Neutres said that although a section of the show was dedicated to his work during the war, “an art exhibition is not a court of history”.
“The period was a great source of pain for Herge,” he said. “He greatly regretted his cowardice.”
Like very many others, Mr Neutres said, the cartoonist slipped into a kind of passivity and neutrality after the German army occupied Belgium in 1940.
“He felt very guilty although he did not collaborate actively,” Mr Neutres said. “There is an interview in the show where he is clearly marked by this and it remains a stain on his career.”
The war was a rich creative period for him, the curator added.
Mr Neutres said the main aim of the show, which runs until the middle of January next year, was to show the breadth of Herge’s talent as a great storyteller, artist and graphic designer.
“We believe that from the beginning, Herge positioned himself as an artist who sought inspiration from painters as diverse as Holbein, Miro and Rembrandt. “When you see what work he collected – and we have some of it in the show – it is of incredibly contemporary artists, such as the minimalist Lucio Fontana and pop artist Roy Lichtenstein.”
Herge died at the age of 75 in 1983, after drawing 24 Tintin books, which sold more than 250 million copies. Tintin is a boy reporter who has a series of adventures with regular characters including his dog Snowy, the scientist Prof Calculus and the seafaring Capt Haddock,
‘ An art exhibition is not a court of history Jerome Neutres curator
who is forever exclaiming: “Blistering barnacles!”
Mr Neutres said Tintin was a modern masterpiece “because it is so universal and has been translated into 100 languages and is still being translated”.
The exhibition records Herge’s often pained private life and shows how his friendship with a young Chinese art student Zhang Chongren helped him to deepen the storylines of his books.
Tintin first appeared in the conservative Catholic newspaper Le Vingtieme Siecle in 1929, and the first book, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, came a year later. A new edition will published for the first time in colour in January in time for the centenary of the Russian revolution.