Seven years ago, at the Paris Book Fair, comics gurus Benoît Peeters and Pascal Ory gave a talk. They called it "Towards a New History of the Bande Dessinée". The history of comics and graphic novels, they asserted, was finally an acknowledged fact. But an important task still remained. As Peeters put it, "We need to bring the BD into history itself and, especially, into the history of aesthetics."
With its joyous, erudite Comics on Every Floor, Paris' Pompidou Centre is now doing just that. Offering five separate exhibitions on five levels, this outsize super-show occupies the whole museum. In a building of 80,000 square feet, there are 800 pieces to see.
Museums here in France have featured comics art for decades. But bandes dessinées often appear as a vehicle, illustrating (or personalizing) identities or points in time. There are, of course, many shows on individual artists which detail their styles, lives and inspirations. A few great idols have been shown in grand locations; Hergé was exhibited at the Pompidou in 2006 then, a decade later, at Paris' Grand Palais. Each passing year also brings exhibitions on BD history and many of these, like 2015's "The Golden Age of Belgium's Bande Dessinée", 2017's "Goscinny Beyond the Laughter" or 2022's "Spirou in the Turmoil of the Holocaust", are truly excellent.
The Pompidou show, however, is something else entirely. It is exactly what Ory and Peeters hoped for: a national museum embracing comics as fine art. Space in the collections of that site Parisians call "Beaubourg" has been given to Winsor McCay, George McManus, Edmond-François Calvo, Will Eisner, George Herriman and Hergé. This show, entitled La bande dessinee au musée ("Comics in the Museum"), also includes old and new works by living bédéistes, hung "in dialogue" throughout the actual galleries. Some of these juxtapositions are amusing (Philippe Dupuy and Matisse, Benoît Jacques and Jean Dubuffet), some are poetic (Catherine Meurisse and Mark Rothko, Edmond Baudoin and Artaud) and others almost rhyme (David B and André Breton, Blutch and Balthus, Brecht Evens and Paul Klee). Combinations like those of Lorenzo Mattotti with Francis Bacon – or Emmanuel Guibert and Robert Doisneau – are especially striking. But none of it looks at all forced or artificial.
The floor above the main galleries houses another show, which is called Bande Dessinée 1964-2024. This extensive undertaking – it covers the top floor – demonstrates how the 9th art evolved its modernism. Viewers will see three traditions mature and connect: Asian manga, European BD and American comics. The expo begins with a children's art starting to shrug off its codes. This is the era of Barbarella's erotic sci-fi, of Hara-Kiri rejuvenating satire's bite and of Bazooka, a collective that foretold punk. In Japan, the juncture was shaped by Garo, the avant-garde monthly in whose pages gegika authors became auteurs. Different eruptions were taking place in America, ignited by Kurtzman's Mad and Help!, then producing Zap, Bijou Funnies and their peers. Boosted by the work of signatures like Crumb and Shelton, Spiegelman and Trina Robbins, these too changed graphic language and its import. One of many assets in the show's catalogue is the weight it gives to links between such national groups.
Crammed with splendid originals, paste-ups and covers, as well as giant blow-ups, this opening room sets the show's modus operandi. It then proceeds not by theory or chronology but via theme; tall walls with moving projections carve out a dozen spaces, each of which has its own leitmotif. After CONTRE-CULTURE ("Counter-Culture"), viewers wander through rooms that deal with EFFROI ("Fright"), RÊVE ("Dreams"), RIRE ("Laughter"), COULEUR, NOIR ET BLANC ("Black, White and Colour"), HISTOIRE ET MÉMOIRE ("History and Memory"), ÉCRITURE DE SOI ("Autobiography"), AU FIL DE JOURS ("Everyday Life"), LITTÉRATURE ("Literature"), ANTICIPATION ("Futurism"), VILLES ("Cities") and GÉOMÉTRIE ("Geometry").
Those divisions house a mind-blowing parade of work by artists old and new, mainstream and niche. They house over a hundred names, from Neal Adams and Shin'inchi Abe right down the alphabet to S. Clay Wilson, Yūichi Yokoyama and Zep. Viewers can peruse Albert Breccia and Jochen Gerner, Moebius and Gil Kane, Tardi and Gébé, Benito Jacovitti and Sanpei Shirato. Inside every space the ambiance is different, enhanced by judicious sound, wall colour and lighting. But, for many visitors, the big thrill will simply be to see so many greats.
The expo's wall projections, groupings and enlargements constitute a whole set of accessory treats. You can watch a drawing bout between Franquin, Fournier, Brétecher and Uderzo, or see time-lapsed slices of Richard McGuire's Here. There are towering reproductions of covers from Garo, Hara-Kiri and Un Regarde Moderne. Connected frames from single works occupy entire walls, as is the case with Killoffer's Les cauchemar de l'amateur ("The amateur's nightmare"), Hideshi Hino's La Filette de l'enfer ("Girl-child from Hell") and David B's Les complots nocturnes ("Nightly Conspiracies").
Oversize single pieces – like Stéphane Blanquet's design for his extraordinary tapestry La Pythie face aux Signes ("Priestess Faced with Signs") – get the luxury of space in which to breathe. (Seth's 3-D model of Ontario fills a room.) All these are astute choices that create a lively rhythm and the thinking behind each theme is on the wall. Every French text is rendered into English.
Bande Dessinée 1964-2024 had four curators (Anne Lemonnier, Emmanuèle Payen, Lucas Hureau and Thierry Groensteen) and, like all five shows, it employed both in-house and exterior experts. Working under the Pompidou's director Laurent Le Bon and deploying every kind of institutional resource, this is an effort that re-positions an institution. For, unlike so many presentations at the Beaubourg, it is more than just a worthy or predictable show. This is a critical watershed and a defining moment. In addition, while its expertise is world-class, the show's intellectual brio is proudly, truly Francophone.
In addition to proving the subject's sweep and richness, Comics on Every Floor also makes clear why the works on show deserve such walls. The evolution tracked in 1964-2024, and the works displayed in La bande dessinee au musée, testify that the best such pieces do indeed tackle the questions posed by more official art. Module by module and wall by wall, you see planches and pages engage with the natural and the conceptual, with formalised structure and experiment, with realist candour and expressionist reverie. Oldenburg's art that fell out of the doggy's mouth is just as present as those satiric visuals prized by Baudelaire.
A critical role in Bande Dessinée 1964-2024 was played by its designer, Laurence Le Bris. Le Bris has been staging exhibitions for thirty years and her experience is more than evident. She grounded the expo in its first room, with its suite of works from the '60s and '70s. After that, she guides its path with cycloramas which, tall and white, resemble undulating pages. Another shrewd choice was suspending the first room of boards in clear squares, all hung at eye level. This permits an intimate view but kicks things off in a way that still feels personal.
"I needed viewers on a level with the art," she says. "I wanted to retain that individual bond with the page. But the majority of pieces are fairly small, so I had to find some way they could command the space." As we stood chatting at the exhibition's end point, Seth's giant city crouched to our left. On our right, a wall was covered with Chris Ware's new mural. Yet, back at the start, almost a hundred yards away, I could still read the giant word CONTRE-CULTURE. That, said Le Bris, was very deliberate. "You're always aware of how much everything has stemmed from that point."
For a dozen years now, there's been more and more emphasis on BD art as an aesthetic corpus. Originals frequently feature in high-end auctions, just as they fill the walls of Paris sites like Galerie Barbier, Huberty & Breyne, Galerie Martel, Galerie Daniel Maghen, and Art-Maniak. There is, however, a caveat to keep in mind, as historian Pascal Ory warned back in 2017. Even while demanding real aesthetic respect, he and Peeters cautioned against "fetishizing" the art.
As Ory noted then, the temptation to reify visuals has always existed. "Because the suffix phile denotes obsessive love, it's there in our very term for comics-lover: bédéphile. So, from the start, BD fans were cast as fetishists! But to objectify only one component is to distort the bande dessinée's real history … As a historian and as Goscinny's biographer, I can assure you that annoyed many of its first creators."
Much has changed since that 2017 book fair. In 2021, Pascal Ory was elected to the Académie Française. Two years later, Benoît Peeters received the Chair of Création Artistique from the Collège de France. Bédéistes have also breached the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which now numbers Catherine Meurisse, Emmanuel Guibert and Marjane Satrapi as members. These are all consecrations of the highest rank and they have elevated the BD's status. Yet, when it comes to glorifying its visuals, many a critic still has reservations.
Speaking to Didier Pasamonik in 2022, Pascal Ory broached a few of the reasons. "Ever since the 21st century began, we've seen a growing appropriation of BD by the system-with-a-capital-S. Countless institutions now exploit the form: schools, museums, cultural groups … some use it for education, others want it to attract youth. Others think the BD can reach a less well-off public. Then you have all those who view the planche as art."
Benoît Peeters shares a measure of this disquiet. Peeters introduces the Pompidou's main catalogue (all but one of the shows gets a separate book). His essay underlines why sequence and story still matter. "When we look at pages drawn by Albert Uderzo or Jacques Tardi, Jirō Taniguchi or Posy Simmonds, we can feel how they are infused with the energy of a narrative; they were designed to be read and that aspect of what makes them memorable is important. When such a page is hung on a wall in a museum or gallery, that fundamentally changes its meaning. Removed from the narrative of which it is a part, often stripped of the color meant to complete it and, sometimes, with its text elements missing, the page becomes more a decorative object than a narrative one … If selling original comics art becomes more lucrative for authors than selling the comics themselves, it could mean a fundamental change to the medium's nature."
Neither of the Beaubourg's biggest shows are worried by this. But that's because the exhibition on Level Two, Corto Maltese, A Fantastic Life, deals explicitly with the question. This show is all about BD as a whole, explored through the fabrication and "career" of just one character.
Corto Maltese came from the pen of Hugo Pratt (1927-1995), who described him as "a sailor of fortune". The character first appeared in 1967, by which time his author was already forty. Born Ugo Eugenio Prat in Rimini, Italy, he led a restless and enterprising life – and he made Corto Maltese its incarnation. As his character evolved over a dozen books, their author lived and worked not only in Italy, but in East Africa, Argentina, England, Brazil, Ireland, Switzerland and France. Corto had first appeared in the pages of Sgt Kirk, a comic concerned with a separate Pratt character. But during the early '70s, via Communist kiddie magazine Pif Gadget, the unconventional mariner became a star.
Pratt based his saga on one of the oldest formulas, that of daring exploits in exotic places. But what explains Corto's presence at the Beaubourg is the way his creator used those protocols, underlining the novelty of an offbeat hero. As a draughtsman, Pratt is bold and fluid, with a genuine gift for watercolor. Yet the true subject of A Fantastic Life is how he reconfigured autofiction through his avatar.
Showing this means dealing with what Pratt omitted, for much of his saga works through inference and suggestion. Corto Maltese is an inscrutable chap, shaped as much by the unsaid (and the absent) as through actual speech. He certainly has the classic audacity, dash and smarts, but his equivocal heart is always very clear. Corto holds echoes of other figures Pratt knew well : the hard-boiled detectives of '40s and '50s American pulps and the gunslingers of fellow Italian Sergio Leone.
Hugo Pratt was a tireless traveller, an omnivorous reader and a workaholic. In 1985, at the age of 58, he trekked all over Patagonia, finished a tenth Corto album and illustrated the poems of Rudyard Kipling, the erotic sonnets of Giorgio Baffo (penned in the 17th century) and Arthur Rimbaud's Letters from Africa. All of his many activities shaped Corto Maltese, whose adventures are stuffed with surprise geographies and allusions. Whether he is seeking a lost manuscript by Lord Byron or meeting Jack London during the Russo-Japanese war, Corto – just like Pratt – always has a book to hand. He might be accompanied by the Siberian Rasputin or the khat-chewing tribal warrior Cush, but his thoughts remain with the likes of Montaigne, Thomas More and William Butler Yeats.
Most of the histories Pratt's books traverse are real, but their narratives stray far from genuine fact. In Yemen and Indonesia, Bombay and Barbados, the South Seas and Manchuria, Corto Maltese collides with authentic events. But his story, like the characters Pratt provides, zig-zags in and out of something much more bizarre. Corto runs across Hemingway and Hermann Hesse, Manfred von Richthofen and Butch Cassidy – as he accrues female associates with tasty names like "Louise Brookszowyc", "Changaï Li" and "Bouche Dorée" ("Golden Lips").
In a series important to artists such as Jacques Tardi and Frank Miller, Hugo Pratt forged coherence out of wild incongruities. The sheer eccentricity of Corto Maltese shows how much line and fancy can do with a formula. But the sailor still remains an enduring cult and his plastic qualities, so apparently simple, have retained all their iconic insouciance. In 2002, when Dior needed a face for their men's cologne, they replaced a live idol – football's Zinedine Zidane – with Corto Maltese.
Descending one more level in the Pompidou takes you to its Children's Floor (in fact a mezzanine). Here, a fourth exposition offers another face of comics and it's the product of a female imagination. While the floors above are concerned with comics-as-art and male adventure, Level One is an installation meant for kids. Entitled Tenir-Tête, this was created by Marion Fayolle, whose work also appears in Bande Dessinée 1964-2024. The expression "tenir tête" has multiple meanings; it can denote "to sail into the wind", "to stand up to" or "to keep your head". When hyphenated, however, it's more like a stated fact, meaning something more like "to have a head".
Fayolle describes Tenir-Tête as "a nomadic encampment". It does centre around heads, a trio of noggins in the form of colossal tents. These images come from Fayolle's La Maison nue ("The Bare House"), a BD whose three misfits share life in a building on the point of demolition. When one of them suffers a fit of writer's block, his female housemate offers to "share her thoughts". Before he can even agree, she lowers a giant, cranium-shaped tent in her image. After some hesitation, he decides to creep inside.
Both book and show encapsulate Fayolle's belief that any book requires the reader to enter its author's being. That experience, she feels, is as visceral as it is mental. During her art studies, Fayolle and two friends (Simon Roussin and Matthias Malingrëy) started an experimental publication called Nyctalope. Nyctalope, which ran for eight years, made its founders famous. Now, at 36, Fayolle is the author of a dozen books, one of which won Angoulême's 2018 Jury Prize. Her quirky and delicate lines are ubiquitous, but the naïveté they convey is an illusion. Far from simple and artless, she is using them to evolve a fresh and subtle surrealism. Her Beaubourg installation is another example of it.
In person a tall and soft-spoken blonde, Fayolle says she had never before made anything aimed at children. "I was really overwhelmed by the space, because it's huge and open, long and thin, without even a wall … None of my work has ever been exterior, either. It's always been about what goes on inside our heads."
"To make things worse," she adds, "I work incredibly small. The rapidograph I use is like a needle. So I just looked at everything I'd done and tried to think what might appeal to a child."
Her open playground is backed by a landscape, a mural that covers the floor's back wall. The bivouac in front of this contains bed-size cushions, ersatz puddles and lightweight campfire "rocks". There's also a rack of aprons that, when slipped over clothes, turn their wearers into part of the scenery. Inside the tents are no toys or tools, but simple creative prompts: a lantern for shadow puppets, projected animations and a floor filled with envelope-like sleeping bags. (The bodies printed on these all lack heads, so children who slip inside them "complete" the characters – a result they can see on the mirror-covered ceiling).
Every inch of the whole thing was initially hand-drawn, then created to Fayolle's specifications. Drawing, she says, is always her key. "In my work, it's the drawings themselves which speak. Whatever I do comes out of them, the drawings devise and generate. For me, the bande dessinée is never illustration, it's never been about picturing a story. "
The museum's fifth and final show, Le Chemin de Terre ("Dirt Track"), touches on all the themes broached by floors above : the BD's history and language, its visual possibilities, its narrative inventiveness and its embrace of varied media. Occupying all of the Pompidou's lowest level, Le Chemin de Terre is the work of the collective Lagon ("Lagoon"). Ten years old this year, the group have realized their "dream publication" on all the walls. It's a monumental version of their own revue which, with every new issue, changes its name, form and participants. Each of its iterations has thirty or more contributors, artists and bédéistes from around the world. While some are well-known, others have never before been published. Says the collective's member Jean-Philippe Bretin, "None of us regard the BD as an established medium … we see comics as a place where visual forms of writing can re-invent themselves, but also a place they can merge with other media."
In Le Chemin de Terre, room after room is papered with stories, strips, ruminations, explorations, meditations and flights of fantasy. Formal comics structures shift and mutate, while inks and colours range from the discreet to the psychedelic. Some frames are two feet tall and others nearly six, and some narratives literally sweep around corners. Special kudos here for the splendid XXL reproduction, handled by the museum's Valérie Leconte and her team, to their screen-printing office and to Lagon's Alexis Beauclair and Gaspard Laurent (the first for riso prints, the second for photocopies). Says another Lagon member, Sammy Stein, "There are as many important qualities in cheap and mediocre reproduction as there are in the slickest or most expensive. That matters as much to us as different dimensions, textures or modes of expression."
All Lagon's issues are displayed in a separate room and it's well worth your time. Many of the crew's earliest revues were hand-bound, with covers that range from screen-printed PVC to ink made from vegetables. Whether your obsession is fanzines, comics or fancy art books, this is one not to miss. Should you brave Comics on Every Floor in a single day, don't let exhaustion keep you from seeing it – especially if the future of comics interests you as much as their past.
Because the Pompidou show coincides with the Paris Olympics, many will assume the former was timed for the Games, meant to showcase the French national passion. (After all, in a country of fanatical readers, one out of every four books sold is a BD.) But the expo was at first due to be held in the Musée d'Orsay – and only as a display of one collector's best pieces. The connoisseur in question, Michel-Èdouard Leclerc, heads an endowment called the Fonds Hélène & Èdouard Leclerc (FHEL), which holds 7,000 BD originals. But plans for the original show bit the dust three years ago, when the Musée d'Orsay's director went to the Louvre. The same year, Laurent Le Bon took over the Pompidou.
Le Bon is a lifelong BD champion; it was he who, in 2006, curated the Beaubourg's famous "Hergé". He is also close to Leclerc and to FHEL, a relationship that super-sized the former project. With the Pompidou about to close for five years, Le Bon and Leclerc had every reason to go for broke. They have, and the effort showed Le Bon just how much had changed. "Twenty years ago, when I proposed Hergé, the resistance I encountered was incredible … arguing for him was like defending a PhD. This time, I had the whole museum behind me."
The epic show, he promises, is not just a gesture. Le Bon now wants to see BD art join the collection. "I want to make it part of our DNA. Because the BD is more than just an authentic art form; I sincerely believe it's a great one."
****
• Four of those five shows in Comics on Every Floor run at the Centre Georges Pompidou (Beaubourg) until November 4, 2024; Le Chemin de Terre will end on August 19. There is a separate entry fee for Bande Dessinée 1964-2024, but all other shows are free with your museum ticket. Advance reservations are recommended as, during the Olympics, is advance consultation about transport choices.
The post Five Floors of Comics: The Beaubourg’s BD Blockbuster appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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