Word: herge
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Tintin fans will rejoice in finally having a permanent tribute to Hergé's creation. And the new Magritte Museum in Brussels was also long overdue, says Charly Herscovici, head of the Magritte Foundation: "Brussels needs a Magritte museum just like Paris has a Picasso museum and Amsterdam a Van Gogh museum." Housed in the prim, neoclassical Hotel Altenloh just a stone's throw from the Royal Palace, the Magritte Museum is part of the complex of buildings that comprise Belgium's Royal Museums of Fine Art. But the sober-minded setting is something of a deception: echoing the artist...
...Unlike Hergé, Magritte was a late bloomer. Born in 1898, his artistic talents initially led him into wallpaper design and advertising (a field in which Hergé briefly moonlighted too). It wasn't until 1945 that he was able to support himself solely though his art. But Magritte's advertising apprenticeship taught him about the efficiency of images, the shock value of a grotesque combination or a violent contradiction. And he delivered them prolifically, from a rainfall of men in bowler hats and portraits of eagles ossified into plants to his famous picture of a pipe, subtitled "Ceci...
...playing chess with his friends, he had a rebellious streak. He briefly joined the Communist Party in 1945 and even contributed poster designs to the cause. "My art is valid only insofar as it is opposed to the bourgeois ideal in whose name life is being extinguished," he said. Hergé admired Magritte, and even bought one of his paintings. Magritte, however, saw Tintin as too colonial, Catholic and conservative. In the 1930s, Hergé drew the cover for a political pamphlet for Léon Degrelle, leader of the Belgian fascists; at the same time, Magritte designed a caricature...
...like Hergé, Magritte created his art for mass consumption and strived to reproduce it as widely as possible. One of his most emblematic images is The Empire of Lights, a mysterious and disturbing juxtaposition of a housefront lit by a streetlamp set under a daytime sky. Magritte painted it 16 times in oil and a further seven times in gouache. "Magritte's focus was on images and the spread of ideas," says Michel Draguet, Director General of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. "He was obsessed with the idea of mass representation, and he loved seeing...
...there, Hergé and Magritte have perhaps their strongest connection: they created works that had both a lasting artistic impact and an enduring popular appeal. Today, their playful images still feed intellectual debate and drive merchandise sales. And they are both famous Belgians...