Ask someone to name 10 famous Belgians, and no one can. The tiny country appears bereft of fame. But on closer inspection, Belgium can make a few claims - without counting waffles and Stella Artois. There's King Leopold II, who ruled the Congo as his own private estate and became a symbol of colonial excess. Or Jacques Brel, who dealt with his insecurities much more elegantly by becoming one of the most wildly expressive singers in history. And there's mustachioed detective Hercule Poirot - true, he's fictional, but no less iconic.
But the country's two greatest cultural figures are both artists, and as of this year those two bowler-hat-loving Belgians - Tintin comic book creator Hergé and the subversive surrealist René Magritte - are being celebrated with their own museums. Not that they would have celebrated together, had they had the chance. The two couldn't have been more different.
In the land of Tintin
The 24 Tintin books by Georges Remi (1907-1983), who reversed his initials to come up with the pseudonym Hergé, have sold more than 230 million copies in 80 languages. In comics-obsessed Belgium, Tintin and his faithful dog Snowy are icons to be found everywhere - from themed restaurants to countless murals to tours of the local streetscapes and the museum mummies that provided Hergé with direct inspiration.
Remi developed his simple but highly influential technique, ligne claire (clear line), to create the most detail-rich of comic panels, and before long his fame and destiny were bound with a boy journalist named Tintin, his blond coif and Boy Scout attitude.
That Boy Scout attitude, though, doesn't mean the stories are without substance. Tom McCarthy, author of Tintin and the Secret of Literature , sees a lot happening within the pages of Tintin books. "The series explored a political world in a state of continual upheaval: conflict over Middle Eastern oil; profiteering multinationals; arms traders with one foot in the president's office; an ongoing space race; perpetually troubled Balkans. … What's not relevant?"
Now the legacy is housed in Musée Hergé, designed by Pritzker Prize-winning French architect Christian de Portzamparc. With its wonky angles and familiarly bold colour palette, it feels like a direct translation of Tintin comics into three-dimensional space, while managing to tell a clear and chronological story of Hergé's life through drawings, film fragments, toys and models.
While Hergé created a graphic history of his times, he himself had a bumpy ride: multiple arrests for working under German occupation, the shame of abandoning his Catholic marriage and aftermaths of several nervous breakdowns. After being stung by accusations of racism and propagandist tendencies in such early works as Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in the Land of the Soviets , he befriended a Chinese student, Tchang Tchong-jen, to avoid the same mistakes in The Blue Lotus (1936). The museum exhibition captures Hergé's thoughts at the time: "It made me conscious of the need to get the true facts on a country and to lay out a coherent story." And while not everything is up to contemporary politically correct standards, he was always open about his true motives: "I was just happy drawing little guys."
The other "little guys" that made up Tintin's recurring cast of charming misfits - iconic Belgians the lot of them - included the bumbling and bowler-hatted (!) detectives Thompson and Thomson, the eccentric Professor Calculus and the glass-shattering opera star Bianca Castafiore. But the ultimate foil for the overly earnest hero Tintin proved to be the grumpy alcoholic sea captain Captain Haddock, who could curse with the best surrealists ("Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles!" "Dunder-Headed Ethelreds!", "Ectoplasm!", "Vegetarian!").
Tintin's continued resonance is perhaps what inspired Steven Spielberg to make The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn , starring Daniel Craig and set for release in 2011. Obviously he's banking on a global audience (the film is being released in Europe first), yet he may remember what American comic artist Chris Ware famously said: "Tintin was fundamentally too sexless to really catch on in America."
In Magritte's dream world When it comes to museum as biography - and both museums follow this line - one quickly gets the impression that René Magritte (1898-1967) had a lot more fun than Hergé. After all, there was always some surrealist prank to be played.
Magritte was one of the most popular artists of the 20th century. His specialty was to bring together familiar and realistic objects in unfamiliar ways - and thereby toy with our minds. He was less a traditional artist than a graphic designer who played with ideas. His main idea? That reality is a trap. His most famous painting is that of a pipe with the line underneath: " Ceci n'est pas une pipe. " (And indeed, while it looks like a pipe, it is, in fact, just an image of a pipe…)
The Musée Magritte takes up a wing of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in central Brussels. From the outside, one sees projected white clouds in the windows - as if you're meant to look up to make sure that the Magritte painting Golconda hasn't come to life and that it isn't about to rain men in bowler hats.
Inside, over three dimly lit floors and 250 major works, complete with background information and an occasional slapstick home film, one gets the impression that Magritte had a very nice ride indeed. And, similarly to the Musée Hergé, the museum provides a strong impression of the times in which he lived.
But Magritte's life wasn't all fun and word games. As a boy, he found his mother's body after she committed suicide, her face shrouded with cloth - an image that reappears throughout his oeuvre. He also had two distinct sides. While he played the revolutionary, he did not play the role of bohemian artist. He led a settled life with his wife in bourgeois comfort. During Belgium's occupation in the Second World War, he worked as a counterfeiter of paintings, money and documents. And whenever he got restless, he could always get into literary fights with André Breton (a French poet and a founder of the surrealist movement) and his band of overly serious Parisian surrealists, or hang out with his sassy local surrealist mates in one of Brussels's many excellent bars.
This is not a Belgian Hergé and Magritte don't come across as potential buddy material. Magritte would have no doubt tormented Hergé about Tintin's conservative, colonial and Catholic characteristics And while Hergé strived to be clear, Magritte sought to distort any perception of clarity.
But McCarthy recognizes definitive links between the two: "Both are concerned with the theme of doubling. Belgium is a country of doubles: double culture, double language and so on. As the Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez pointed out recently, Magritte's subtitles can be instantly appreciated by all Belgians, since all their public imagery, from TV to milk cartons, is subtitled."
Certainly they were both products of their times: learning about the power of a clear image while working in advertising, applying film techniques and sequencing in their work, and having strong commercial aspirations that translated into taking advantage of mass production. Tintin scholar Roman Wald-Lasowski sees more of a shared playfulness: "Both artists play with the principle of illusion and the playful spirit - typically Belgian!"
Thanks to all these shared characteristics, and especially their use of simple graphics to represent everyday objects, both artists proved to be huge influences on Andy Warhol and other American pop artists. Warhol claimed Hergé's influence on him was as big as Walt Disney's, while Magritte was often referred to as the "Father of American Pop Art" - to his eternal chagrin.
With two museums exploring the lives of two fascinating Belgians in their proper context, this tiny country's famously lacking self-esteem should finally get a much-deserved boost.
Special to The Globe and Mail
* * *
Pack your bags
Musée Hergé 26 Rue du Labrador, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve; 32 (10) 488-421; www.museeherge.com. The museum is a 45-minute train trip from Brussels Central Station. Musée Magritte Rue de la Régence 3; 32 (02) 508-3211; www.musee-magritte-museum.be.
WHERE TO STAY
Hotel Orts 38-40 Rue Auguste Orts; 32 (02) 517-0700;
www.hotelorts.com. From $139. A relatively new, stylish hotel.
WHAT TO DO
Faubourg Saint-Antoine 65 Avenue Albert Giraud; 32 (02) 245-6394. A Tintin-themed restaurant. La Fleur en Papier Doré, 55 Rue des Alexiens; 32 (02) 511-1659;
www.lafleurenpapierdore.be. Magritte's favourite bar, recently reopened to its former glory.
A comic walk Take a comic book-themed walk. Pick up the route map at the Brussels tourist office at Hotel de Ville, Grand-Place, 32 (0) 513-8940, or find it online at
www.bitc.be.
Flea market Rummage through Place du Jeu de Balle, a daily morning flea market, for everything from used comics to bowler hats.
Magritte Museum 135 Rue Esseghem; 32 (02) 428-2626;
www.magrittemuseum.be. This excellent museum was the artist's home between 1930 and 1954 and is filled with his "familiar objects."
S.K.