Le monde d'Hergé

15.09.2016 → 15.01.2017
Le crabe aux pinces d’or de Hergé

For Septem­ber 2016, mudac welcomes Hergé as its guest of honour. This exhib­i­tion is an invit­a­tion to the Hergé Museum in Louv­ain-la-Neuve and was designed in part­ner­ship with mudac. Featur­ing original artwork, archive docu­ments, photos and unpub­lished work, the exhib­i­tion looks back on the maes­tro’s world, with its clear lines, and unveils its treas­ures. The exhib­i­tion, aimed at an audi­ence aged 7 to 77, also seeks to present lesser-known aspects of a genius who was an illus­trator, cari­ca­tur­ist, poster designer and graphic artist all rolled into one. Original docu­ments and arte­facts confirm, if proof were needed, that Hergé’s work has a right­ful place in the museum, both as a pion­eer of the comic book on a global stage and also as a witness to 20th century history.
This is the second time that mudac has partnered with the BDFIL fest­ival. In 2010, it opened its doors to Titeuf and his gang in Zep: The Sketched Portrait, and mudac is now taking a closer look at the graphic artwork of Hergé, acknow­ledged by all in the field to be the king of the graphic novel. In this exhib­i­tion, mudac tackles new themes around graphic novels and cartoons, an area that it aims to spot­light by means of its exhib­i­tions.
The early career of Georges Remi, Hergé’s real name, is traced through an array of origin­als that have rarely been put on public display: advert­ising mater­ial, posters and sketch­books. While he mainly worked as an illus­trator, it was during this period that he created the char­ac­ter of Totor, a resource­ful Boy Scout, considered the fore­run­ner to Tintin. Hergé would invent a large number of heroes, notably Quick and Flupke and Jo, Zette and Jocko, for the pages of the Petit Vingtième, a weekly chil­dren’s supple­ment published by the Belgian daily Le Vingtième Siècle. So when their author turned his hand to the comic strip, Tintin made his debut in the Petit Vingtième in 1929. The young report­er’s first story featured a jour­ney to the land of the Sovi­ets. The exhib­i­tion focuses partic­u­larly on China. This coun­try played an import­ant role in Hergé’s career, because of a change in his work­ing meth­ods made after his 1934 encounter with the Chinese artist Zhang Chon­gren, then a student at the Académie des beaux-arts in Brus­sels, who was the inspir­a­tion for the char­ac­ter Chang Chong-Chen. He then star­ted carry­ing out more seri­ous research and developed a new atten­tion to real­ism, which shows through for the first time in The Blue Lotus. This emblem­atic book, the corner­stone in the Adven­tures of Tintin, reflects the profound trans­form­a­tion in the saga as it developed into a major work.
A further room is dedic­ated to original media which served as vehicles for the adven­tures of Tintin and other heroes that sprang from the Hergé imagin­a­tion, in partic­u­lar the journal Tintin. It also includes objects from the era, such as figur­ines, stamps and note­pa­per. This room also traces the evol­u­tion of Hergé’s graphic style and the devel­op­ment of such char­ac­ters as Tintin, Snowy, Captain Haddock and Thom­son and Thompson. A large array of original artwork bears witness to the birth of a comic strip and docu­ments Hergé’s work­ing prac­tices, from early research to a finished panel, by way of the first sketches. The docu­ments on display repres­ent a series of images show­ing the long process ulti­mately lead­ing to a prin­ted book. In addi­tion, there is a whole room devoted solely to forty original plates show­ing how the author’s work developed over the course of time. Inter­est­ing objects, such as Hergé’s writ­ing desk and old merchand­ising, comple­men­ted by audi­ovisual media, immerse us in the design­er’s creat­ive world. The exhib­i­tion concludes with a life-size mural featur­ing all the char­ac­ters who have played a part in the quiffed report­er’s adven­tures.

Sports d'hiver, projet d’affiche réalisé par Hergé en 1932
Tintin en Amérique
King Ottokar's Sceptre
Black Island
Vue de l'exposition Le Monde d’Hergé
Vue de l'exposition Le Monde d’Hergé
Vue de l'exposition Le Monde d’Hergé
Vue de l'exposition Le Monde d’Hergé