Word: museumize
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Situated in Louvain-La-Neuve, a new town some 20 miles (32 km) southeast of Brussels, the Hergé Museum is a stunning piece of architecture. Designed by Pritzker Prize winner Christian de Portzamparc, its sleek concrete, steel and glass form makes it look like a stranded ocean liner, an image that deliberately echoes Tintin's many maritime exploits. Built at a cost of $20 million, and financed by Hergé's second wife Fanny, the museum reflects Hergé's huge corpus of work, much of which has, until now, been languishing largely unseen in studios and bank vaults...
...image with robust, universal elements, influenced cartoonists that followed, such as Asterix creators Goscinny and Uderzo, and the Smurfs' Peyo. And while Tintin never made it big in America, Pop Art stars Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein recognized Hergé as an inspiration for the Pop Art movement. The museum has three portraits of Hergé painted by Warhol, who once said that the Belgian artist "influenced my work as much as Disney," and Lichtenstein designed the cover for Frederic Tuten's 1996 novel Tintin in the New World. (Read: "Tintin Travels to Tinseltown...
Hergé rarely traveled to the far-flung places he described so vividly in stories such as Tintin in Tibet and Tintin in the Congo. But he researched fastidiously, and the museum displays some of the 30,000 cuttings from magazines and newspapers that he hoarded over the years. In one of the eight themed galleries, original artwork sits alongside photos of speeding cars, royal palaces and African witch doctors, which Hergé used for reference and inspiration. "He had a forensic dedication to accuracy," says Nick Rodwell, head of Moulinsart, the organization that runs Hergé's estate...
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...
Inside, the space has been completely remodeled to accommodate the 200 Magritte items on display: paintings, drawings, gouaches, posters, advertising art, letters, photographs, sculptures and films. It cost $10 million to build, most of that paid by Franco-Belgian energy giant GDF Suez, which is using the museum as a laboratory of green technologies like LED lights and climate-control systems...