The Hergé Museum in Belgium: more than just a Tintin museum

If there's one Belgian comic that has traveled the world, it's The Adventures of Tintin. The reporter Tintin and his dog Snowy have traveled the world to solve mysteries, their stories have also been translated into more than 70 languages and over 30 dialects. These days Tintin has landed just outside Brussels and comic book lovers can visit him at the Hergé Museum.

© Hergé-Moulinsart 2015

Tintin is cartoonist Hergé's most famous creation, but certainly not the only one. The Hergé Museum in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium focuses on the entirety of Hergé's oeuvre, his life, and his influences. It's more than just a Tintin museum.
 

Visiting the Hergé Museum

© Nicolas Borel Architecte Christian de Portzamparc

After the passing of Hergé in 1986, the Hergé Foundation was formed. This foundation dedicated itself to identifying and categorizing the parts of Hergé's life and work that could later be exhibited in museums. In 2001 the site of the museum was decided: the Rue du Labrador in Louvain-la-Neuve, only 30 km from Brussels. In 2009 the Musée Hergé or the Hergé Museum opened its doors to the public.

The renowned French architect Christian de Portzamparc designed a building with modern lines, big spaces, and clear connections between each location. De Portzamparc's museum building now houses three floors, eight exhibitions, a café, a museum shop, a museum restaurant, and a small cinema. Visitors start their tour on the top level and end back at the museum entrance hall.
 

Musée Hergé exhibition

Each room at the Hergé Museum is dedicated to a specific theme. These themes are illustrated with original drawings, magazine copies, the author's personal items, items related to his work, and, of course, the original work itself.

Each visitor to the Musée Hergé is given a free audio guide. Each room in the museum gets about three explanations on the free audio guide, and they're really good. I'm usually not a big fan of audio guides as I like to visit an exhibition at my own pace, but there was so much to do at the Hergé Museum that I always finished listening to the explanations before I'd seen an entire room.

What's also nice is that the free guide isn't just an audio guide but functions a bit like an iPod. It has explanations on it but also shows you what it is talking about in the form of photos, extracts, and interviews with Hergé. Some of the exhibition rooms in the Hergé museum even have small quizzes on the audio guide that let you test your knowledge of Hergé and his work.
 

Room 1 – Life of Hergé

Room 1 of the Musée Hergé gives us a biography of Hergé, illustrated with personal items and some of his earliest work.

Hergé was born as Georges Remi in 1907 in Etterbeek, Brussels. Ever since he was a child he loved art and drawing, when he joined the Boy Scouts he started illustrating comics for boy scout magazines such as Le Boy Scout. That's also where his first real comic appeared as a series, TTotor, C.D. des Hannetons. Being in the boy scout movement greatly influenced Hergé and Tintin is often seen as the stereotype of a boy scout.

In 1924, Georges started signing his work with “Hergé”. It's a pseudonym derived from his own name: take the initials of Georges Remi, turn them around and you get R.G., pronounced as “Hergé” in French.

One year later Hergé started working at the newspaper Le XXe Siècle and three years after that the paper asked him to add a supplement for youngsters, Le Petit Vingtième. Tintin the reporter and his dog Snowy first appeared in 1929. In 1930, Hergé created two other characters who are famous in Belgium and even had their own cartoon on television later: Quick and Flupke, two real mischievous kids from Brussels.

© Hergé-Moulinsart 2015

Up until 1934, Hergé's foreign characters were often stereotypes, but when he met the Chinese student Tchang that year, who helped him research his new comic The Blue Lotus, he decided to conduct research for all of his future comics.

In 1940, the Germans invaded Belgium and put an end to Le XXe Siècle. Hergé moved The Adventures of Tintin to the newspaper Le Soir, controlled by the occupier. This and some of his associations made him a suspected fascist sympathizer.

He was arrested a few times after Belgium was liberated and forbidden to publish The Adventures of Tintin in any Belgian newspaper until 1946. Hergé would be accused of fascism and collaboration for the rest of his life, but he always denied having Nazi sympathies.

In 1942, the publisher Casterman convinced Hergé to color in all of his works to be published as full albums.

Four years later the magazine Tintin was founded and in 1950 the Studios Hergé opened. The Studios consisted of Hergé and his artist collaborators who would help him create the Adventures of Tintin and all its products. All work created by the studios was solely attributed to the Hergé except for three albums of Quick and Flupke which attribute  Studios Hergé as the creator.

Hergé died in 1983, his last comic Tintin et l'Alph-art was left unfinished. He was a creator until the end.
 

Room 2 – Variety in Hergé's art

© Hergé-Moulinsart 2015

Hergé also drew advertisement posters, engravings, as well as other art. Examples of these works are on display in Room 2 of the museum. Despite his ability to take on multiple crafts, comics were always Hergé's priority as he believed he could only give 100% and that 100% was needed to perfect them.
 

Room 3 – Hergé's characters

© Hergé-Moulinsart 2015

This Room of the Musée Hergé focuses on Hergé's main characters, in particular, those of the Tintin albums. The audio guide includes some quizzes about the characters. For instance, it lets you test whether you know how to tell Thomson and Thompson apart.
 

Room 4 – Hergé and the movies

On to Room 4 of the Musée Hergé which shows a documentary about the relationship between Hergé's work and the movies. Hergé himself once said that a comic and a movie are basically the same things; the only difference being the characters are still.
 

Room 5 – The laboratory

© Hergé-Moulinsart 2015

Room 5 is called “The laboratory” because this room of the museum focuses on the inventions of Professor Calculus and the elaborate research Hergé and his team did for the album Explorers on the Moon. I read that comic as a kid and had no idea that Hergé even used a scale model of the rocket to get the drawings right! Fun fact: Hergé sent Tintin to the moon in 1954, 15 even before Neil Armstrong set foot there.
 

Room 6 – Tintin's travels

Room 6 of the Hergé Museum shows us all the places in the world Tintin has traveled to and exhibits some of the foreign objects that appear in the comic series. It also addresses how Hergé gained an interest in paranormal activity and extraterrestrial life later on in his career and how signs of that can be found in the Tintin albums.
 

Room 7 – Studios Hergé

Until he was 40, Hergé always worked alone. After that, he began to value teamwork. Part of that was also because of the huge task ahead of him to color in all his old Tintin albums. He kept drawing the characters but often left the background and the coloring to others. For works produced after 1950 Hergé had help from his collaborators at the studio.
 

Room 8 – Hergé's fame

© Hergé-moulinsart 2015

The last room of the Musée Hergé is dedicated to Hergé's fame and other famous people he knew. One of the things on display here is a portrait of Hergé by Andy Warhol.

Musée Hergé : the verdict

Usually, when I visit a museum I expect to spend about an hour there. If it's shorter, the museum is either small or not my thing; if it's longer, it was interesting. I spent almost two hours browsing each floor at the Hergé Museum as there is so much to discover! The available audio/video guide was superb, the building designed by Christian de Portzamparc impressive, and the exhibition very interesting.

The Hergé Museum comes highly recommended!

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Musée Hergé provided my entrance to the museum so that I could write this post about my visit. As always, opinions expressed here are entirely my own.