About four comic art exhibits in France in the
summer of 2019
Jean-Paul Gabilliet
Université Bordeaux Montaigne
Sempé en liberté, itinéraire d’un
dessinateur d’humour (Sempé
at large: a humor cartoonist’s itinerary). Bordeaux: Musée Mer Marine. May
29-October 6, 2019.
Jack Kirby : la galaxie des
super-héros (Jack Kirby: the galaxy of superheroes). Louise
Hallet and Bernard Mahé. Cherbourg-en-Cotentin, Normandy: Musée Thomas Henry. May
25-September 1, 2019.
Scientifiction - Blake et Mortimer au musée des arts
et métiers. Thierry Bellefroid and Eric Dubois. Paris: Musée des
Arts et Métiers. June 26, 2019-January 20, 2020.
Histoire de l’art cherche
personnages… (Art history looking for characters…).
Bordeaux: CAPC. June 20, 2019 thru February 2, 2020.
Holidaymakers (or wandering scholars) engaging in comic art tourism will
possibly remember France as their destination of choice in the summer of 2019.
Even for a country where museums of all sizes nationwide seem to have developed
a particular liking for funny books since the early 21st century, this estival
surge of exhibitions giving pride of place to comic art appears as an unusually
happy coincidence, especially given the geographical diversity of the locations
featuring some of the medium’s luminaries. Another worthwhile point is that each
of those events highlights a distinct approach to comic art exhibiting. Although
comics have been displayed in museums and galleries increasingly routinely all
over the world in the last five decades, the challenge that curators have to
meet is to constantly reinvent the museographic approaches to the medium to avoid
rehashing the “the artist and his/her work” pattern which, however appealing to
mainstream media, way too often frames the public perception of the medium as a
middlebrow, petit-bourgeois ersatz of creator-based fine-arts history. Career
retrospectives of cartoonists are not intrinsically flawed (two will be
reviewed below), but they should not be the only format brought to bear to
develop the museography of comic art.
Poster of the Sempé show. |
Sempé en liberté, itinéraire d’un dessinateur d’humour (Sempé at large: a humor cartoonist’s itinerary) exemplifies the most classical form of monographic comic art museography. It’s apparently odd location—a museum dedicated to oceanography and the history of sea navigation—has nothing to do with any particular connection of the artist with seafaring, but a lot with his personal history as a Bordeaux native. The exhibit displays close to 350 pieces created by Jean-Jacques Sempé, a now-elderly cartoonist whose fame rests on very different pillars in France and the USA. Born into a working-class family outside Bordeaux in 1932, Sempé never received any formal art training and started working in the fifties as a freelance cartoonist for newspapers and magazines. He has actually produced a very limited amount of sequential comics, a format with which he has always felt uncomfortable. Still “Le Petit Nicolas” (Little Nicolas), the comic he contributed to the Belgian magazine Le Moustique from 1956 to 1958 was the origin of his future long-term fame in France. Scripted by René Goscinny (who was to co-create Asterix the Gaul with Albert Uderzo in 1959), this series of one-page gags loosely based on the two creators’ childhood memories was subsequently reborn as of 1959 in the form of illustrated short stories in Bordeaux’s daily newspaper Sud-Ouest and in Goscinny’s new weekly magazine Pilote.
Goscinny (left) and Sempé (right) autographing "Les récrés du Petit Nicolas" (c. 1963). |
Sempé
en liberté exemplifies traditional gallery-like exhibiting, with a great
deal of white wall space and comments in French and (sometimes shoddy) English
underneath the displayed pieces. It is easy to tell that the exhibit has been
put together under the supervision of Martine Gossieaux, the owner of the
Parisian cartoon art gallery that has been Sempé’s agent for years. The show is
basically a chronological overview of the artist’s career illustrated by a wide
choice of original art pieces and, unfortunately, very few printed documents. The
eponymous 300-page catalog released in connection with the show (Sempé : Itinéraire d'un dessinateur d'humour, Martine Gossieaux, 2019, €39.00) regrettably misses some of the pieces on
display, but otherwise aptly recreates and sometimes provides further insight
into the breadth of Sempé’s creativity, that of an instantly recognizable
draftsman who has always cultivated minimalist composition and low-key humor
and based most of his illustration work on small (or sometimes tiny) characters
featured within or against expansive backgrounds.[1]
Poster of the Kirby show. |
Darkseid room. ©JMEnault_Ville de Cherbourg-en-Cotentin |
The other theme of the show is to have included the creators that were
influenced more or less closely by Kirby, from James Steranko to John Buscema to
Mike Mignola and others. The casual visitor who is not particularly
knowledgeable about US comic history will probably be surprised by the
inclusion of twenty original pages of “Duel in the Depths,” a story published
in 1968 in Silver Surfer #3 and drawn
by… John Buscema. It is a treat for the eyes for sure—but also a reason to
wonder: how off-topic can museographic choices go? In this case the curators’
historiographic concerns may have overshot the mark. So much wall space devoted
to another artist in a Jack Kirby exposition is perhaps a tad too much (says
this writer who is otherwise a huge fan of J. Buscema’s late sixties’
artistry…). The exhibit is a pure delight for any original comic art
connoisseur, who will welcome the opportunity to behold such a spectacular
array of John Buscema art from the artist’s best period. Only a curmudgeon
would deny themselves such pleasure.
The actual final regret about this show, however, cannot be blamed on
its curators. The planned catalog had to be dropped because of the demands of
the Marvel material’s copyright owner regarding reproduction fees and editorial
control—the Walt Disney Company.[3]
Scientifiction EP Jacobs poster. |
Jacobs show. © J.-P. Gabilliet |
Those visitors that have
little or no familiarity with Blake and Mortimer will quickly lose track of
what elements belong to which album, but it does not really matter. The show’s
curators Thierry Bellefroid, a Belgian writer and TV journalist, and Eric
Dubois, a French professor of applied arts, have done away with the traditional
museographic criteria of chronology and linearity. They have instead structured
the exposition around the four elements: air, earth, wind, fire. After entering
a lobby where they are treated to some background information about Jacobs’
career, visitors pass into a dark corridor only lit by loop footage from Fritz
Lang’s M (1931) featuring Peter Lorre
on the left wall, and Robert Wiene’s The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) on the right wall; these two early
expressionist influences permeated Jacobs’ imagery and visuals well into the
1950s and are particularly perceptible in the 1956 album La Marque Jaune (The Yellow
“M”), regarded by many as the
original run’s masterpiece. In the large central room plunged in a penumbra,
visitors can circulate freely from one showcase to another. Each showcase, related
to a theme and a color, displays (sometimes outlandish) technological objects and
original pieces of Jacobs artwork that resonate with one another. The room at
the far end, in normal lighting, is a laboratory of sorts in which visitors can
view more state-of-the-art scientific objects of yesteryear and a number of
artifacts coming from Jacobs’ personal studio, such as models characters’ heads
but also of l’Espadon (the Swordfish, the ultra-advanced aircraft, thanks to
which the European forces defeated their Asian aggressors in the imaginary
Third World War depicted in the series’ first album).
Although the agenda of the
curators is less to show pretty pictures than to bring visitors to immerse
themselves in the scientific imagination and imagery of the mid-20th century,
hardcore comic art amateurs and/or Jacobs fans will not be disappointed with
the show. The selection of artwork on display, on loan from Fondation Roi
Baudoin (Belgium’s royal philanthropic foundation founded under King Baudoin
I’s auspices in 1976), is simply spectacular. It includes a number of pieces
rarely or never shown to the public before, including several detailed preliminary
sketches of full pages that highlight the rigorous craftsmanship that Jacobs
used to put in his drawing. As a final bonus the show is accompanied by a gorgeous
hardbound 100-page catalog with a faux cloth spine that mimics the format of
1950s Blake and Mortimer albums.[4]
Poster of the CAPC show |
The visitor is invited to explore two perpendicular “galleries” divided
into a series of adjacent rooms. Galerie Ferrère has seven rooms titled
Intrigue, Silhouettes, Animaux philosophes (Philosophizing Animals), Attente
(Expectation), La Cage (The Cage), Démultiplication (Multiplication), and Dans
le noir (In the dark). It overarching topic is the quest for the human figure
based on the questioning of modes of existence and representation.
Galerie Foy comprises thirteen rooms divided into nine sections: the
first four have English titles—Privacy, Home, Trauma, Blue Spill—and the last
five French titles—Les démons (The Demons), Le musée (The Museum), Tabloïds
(Tabloids), Cabinet de lecture (Reading Room), and Cinéma (Cinema). Its
subject-matter is the human creature’s quest for meaning, with a focus on
narration rather than representation per
se as in the Galerie Ferrère displays. The most amazing piece, in the
Cabinet de Lecture section, is a 14.5-meter-long steel chassis holding a mobile
conveyor belt to which are attached the pages of Une histoire de l’art, Philippe Dupuy’s own take on art history
which was originally created as a webcomic before being published as a
23-meter-long leporello in 2016.[6]
Viewers will find it impossible to read each page, which is in constant motion,
but cannot help witnessing the endless succession that replicates the temporal
flow of pages in a webcomic.
Detail from Philippe Dupuy’s installation. © J.-P. Gabilliet |
The exhibit’s underlying agenda questions the major changes and
achievements of figurative art since the late 1960s and the heyday of “figuration narrative,” a current
identified by art critic Gérald Gassiot-Talabot
around those French contemporary artists that simultaneously rejected
full-fledged abstraction and “the static derisiveness of US pop art”
(Gassiot-Talabot). It is important to remember that this pictorial movement (exemplified
in the Bordeaux show by some of its big names: Adami, Arroyo, Erró, Klasen, Monory,
Rancillac, etc.) was the gateway
of comic art into museums through Bande
dessinée et figuration narrative, the high-profile exposition held at the
Paris Musée des Arts Décoratifs in spring 1967.[7]
In many respects Histoire de l’art
cherche personnages… comes across as a follow-up to the trailblazing show
of 1967. It provides insight into the huge strides achieved over the last
half-century by comic art in terms of cultural legitimization and by
figurativeness as artistic ethos in the early 21st century contemporary art
scene.[8]
The four exhibits I have briefly
reviewed here testify to the diversity of possible museographic uses of comic
art nowadays. From standard monography (Sempé) to historiographic monography
(Kirby) to cultural history (Jacobs) to dialoguing across art forms (Histoire de l’art…) comic art exhibiting
seems increasingly open to a plurality of conceptual and aesthetic
possibilities that by far transcend the arguably increasingly humdrum pattern
of “career retrospectives,” notwithstanding the genuine satisfaction one is
perfectly free to experience while beholding wall-to-wall displays of original
comic art drawn by a given creator. While many museums and galleries still
regard comic art as “easily accessible” art that will likely attract paying
visitors—a legitimate expectation by all means, unfortunately—the full
museographic potential of comic art is yet to be tapped. The more imaginative
curators will prove, the more alive we will all become to the versatility of
our favorite art form.
(A version of this review will appear in an upcoming issue of IJOCA, but we wished to make it available while the exhibits included are still available to visit)
[1] TV clip in French
on the exhibit : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMaSA3KlafQ.
[3] Photographs of the
exhibit can be seen at the following URLs : https://www.actuabd.com/Jack-Kirby-roi-de-Cherbourg;
http://bdzoom.com/142972/patrimoine/incroyable-exposition-jack-kirby-une-galaxie-de-planches-originales-du-createur-de-captain-america-envahit-cherbourg/.
[4] Thierry Bellefroid (dir.), Scientifiction. Blake et Mortimer au musée des arts et métiers
(Editions BLAKE & MORTIMER, 2019), €30.00. Photographs of the show:https://www.actuabd.com/Scientifiction-Blake-Mortimer-dans-le-temple-de-la-science.
[5] The roster of comic
artists includes David B., Blanquet & Olive, Charles Burns, Cham, Julie
Doucet, Philippe Dupuy, André Franquin, Jochen Gerner, Marcel Gotlib, Emmanuel
Guibert, Patrice Killoffer, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, Chantal Montellier, Pierre La
Police, Ruppert & Mulot, Joe Sacco, Johanna Schipper, Joann Sfar, Art
Spiegelman, Lewis Trondheim, Martin Vaughn-James, Fabio Viscogliosi, Chris
Ware, Willem, and Winshluss.
[6] Dupuy’s own
detailed description of this installation:
https://www.du9.org/chronique/une-histoire-de-lart/.
[7] The book published
in connection with that show was translated in English: Pierre Couperie &
Maurice Horn (ed.), A History of the
Comic Strip (New York: Crown, 1968).
[8] The booklet can be
downloaded from https://fr.calameo.com/read/0014801212ede7ed7a1c2.
A press kit in French including several reproductions can be downloaded from http://www.capc-bordeaux.fr/sites/capc-bordeaux.fr/files/capc_dp__histartcherchepersonnages_fr.pdf. A
well-illustrated English-language web presentation of the show is at https://www.fg-art.org/en/exhibition-exhibitions/histoire-de-lart-cherche-personnages.