The Hergé Museum celebrates Tintin

It is possible that the reason ­Belgium has been saddled with a reputation for anonymity is that the two Belgians the world arguably knows best – despite it being the birthplace of Audrey Hepburn and Magritte – are fictional characters. One is Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s detective. The other is another solver of crimes, cracker of mysteries and righter of wrongs: a strangely ageless reporter and adventurer called Tintin, created by the illustrator Georges Remi. At an early age, Remi developed the affectation of signing his illustrations with his initials in reverse order. The resulting nom de plume is now rendered in vast black letters on the outside of an odd-looking new building in the university town of Louvain-la-Neuve: Hergé.

Louvain-la-Neuve is about an hour by train from Brussels, the city that would have seemed a logical site for the Hergé Museum, which opened in June. Hergé was born in the Belgian capital, spent much of his working life there, based his studio there, and inked recognisable Brussels neighbourhoods into several of Tintin’s adventures. Numerous murals and other representations of Tintin and his companions, Captain Haddock and Snowy, decorate the city, and the foyer of Brussels Midi station, home of the Eurostar service, is dominated by an enormous frieze depicting Tintin clinging to the side of a charging locomotive.

Louvain-la-Neuve isn’t a totally unlikely choice: Hergé did live in the area for a while. The Hergé Museum, designed by French architect Christian de Portzamparc, is a beautiful, peculiar edifice: photos from above suggest a coffin-shaped spacecraft that has cracked down the middle upon crash-landing. This is not a Disneyland created to relieve ice cream-smeared children of their pocket money. The Hergé Museum is clearly intended as a shrine to the life and works of a serious, influential artist. Which is as it should be. To describe Hergé as a cartoonist would be to describe Beethoven’s Ninth as a tune: technically correct, but parsimonious with important detail.

The adventures of Tintin span nearly half a century, dating from his first appearance in a children’s newspaper supplement called Le Petit Vingtième in 1929 to the last complete Tintin album, Tintin and the Picaros, published in 1976. You read them as a kid, then return years later, delighted and agog at what you missed the first time. Michael Farr, in his excellent 2001 study Tintin: The Complete Companion, correctly notes: “The child will be gripped by the excitement of Tintin, the comedy, even farce. The adult will additionally find political satire and parody, puns and prescience. ”

The Hergé Museum has ambitions of attracting 200,000 people a year and staff already report instances of 40-minute queues for admission at peak times. The Friday I visit, however, it’s quiet, and ideal for what turns out to be a rewarding morning’s rummaging in three storeys of the memory, imagination and legacy of one of the 20th century’s greatest visual artists. There are some extraordinary treasures. The original artworks, sourced from the largely unseen Studios Hergé archive in ­Brussels, will be rotated every four months: the paper is old and stained with the coffee that Hergé drank and the indiscretions of the cats he adored. At the time of my visit, highlights included a 1934 first edition of The Cigars of the Pharaoh, a copy of that 1929 debut strip, in which Tintin and Snowy embark at Brussels’ Gare du Nord station for their trip to the USSR, and several hand-drawn sketches and plates (these are worth fortunes – at an auction in Namur in May 2009, one hand-drawn page sold for €312,500).

Most revealing are those exhibits that testify to Hergé’s mania for ensuring that every detail of his illustrations was perfect. He did not arrive as an artist fully formed, as is noted in the exhibits on early Tintin works such as Tintin in the Land of the ­Soviets (crude and dreary anti-communist propaganda) as well as the infamous Tintin in the Congo (both crashingly racist and startlingly ­boring). Possibly bruised by his own recognition of such poor work, Hergé became ­stringently meticulous. Display cases contain the magazine ­clippings, photographs and models that Hergé used as source material for some of his most astonishing set-pieces: the marauding Mosquito fighter-bombers of The Red Sea Sharks, the red-and-white chequered rocket from Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon.

Other exhibits demonstrate that there was more to Hergé than Tintin (other comic strips, examples of his work designing advertisements), and that there was more to Tintin than Tintin. Room as well as thought has been devoted to the gestation of the books’ other characters – not only regular sidekicks Snowy and Haddock but such wondrous creations as maddening genius Cuthbert Calculus. These display cases are slung low so younger visitors don’t miss out.

Space is also allocated here to one of the most common criticisms of Hergé: his almost complete reluctance to ­create female characters, with the curious exception of the overwhelming Milanese diva Bianca Castafiore. Text mounted on the wall quotes a letter Hergé wrote in 1964: “It is precisely because I am very reluctant to depict a female in a comical guise that I present so few ‘real’ women in my stories. When a man stumbles and sprawls on the street, people tend to laugh. When a woman falls, there is no laughter.”

At the end of my stroll through the museum, a mirrored walk-in capsule celebrates the 150 languages into which the travels and travails of Tintin have been translated, and another wall heaves with tributes. The diversity of characters tipping their hats is telling. The Dalai Lama is pictured absorbed in Tintin in Tibet. “He influenced my work as much as Disney,” says Andy Warhol. Most generous of all is the testament of Charles de Gaulle: “My only national rival,” he is said to have called Tintin, positively attempting to force French citizenship upon this most famous of Belgians.

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Details

The Hergé Museum is at 26 rue de Labrador, Louvain-la-Neuve, and is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am6pm. www.hergemuseum.com

Eurostar operates up to 10 daily services from London St Pancras to Brussels with return fares from £59, and all Eurostar tickets are valid to and from any Belgian station at no extra cost, www.eurostar.com

Andrew Mueller was a guest of Eurostar