Nine hours (and more) with the Ninth Art
Well, I found a sure fire way to cope with the FOMO of having to skip LICAF 2024…
I hopped on a Eurostar to Paris and took in the quite astounding Comics On Every Floor exhibition at Centre Pompidou.
Here follows a few notes and a lot of photos, but I’ll say up front that the exhibition runs until Nov 2024 and if you can get there you really should. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see so much original comic art ~ and in a seriously serious art museum at that!
I went for two nights with an old friend ~ out after seeing our kids off to school on the Wednesday morning, back in time to collect them after school on the Friday afternoon. By train from Brighton to Paris and back, is comfortingly easy.
Because our AirBnB was in Montmartre, we came out the side of the station and took a short cut (through the Cheap Garish Suits District it seemed), but if you come out the front of Gare du Nord you’ll see evidence of how much respect comics get in France…
Italian artist Lorenzo Mattotti was commissioned to make A LOT of illustrations for last summer’s Paris Olympics/Paralympics, and this massive billboard is still on proud display.
Inclement weather meant our planned evening of food and wine and Parisian diversions looking over the city was more of a scurry along rain-slicked streets to find a vegetarian-friendly restaurant.
A few false starts, looking for something other than salad, resulted in me enjoying a beetroot quinoa dish, while my travel buddy (who we will call Snoid, as that’s his old nickname) stuck with a veggie burger and fries.
I won!
A couple of beers and we dodged as much skywater as we could on the way back to our gaff for an early start the next morning. So much for recapturing our youth in the Folies Bergeres or knocking off some sketches by moonlight … we are clearly growing up. Or old.
Our apartment was on the fifth floor of an old building. Five slippery wooden spiral stairs on top of our beers and it was hard to tell if the spinning heads we felt by the time we crashed was due to that or the beers.
No wi-fi. No tv controls. No kettle. And one of us would draw the short straw and have to sleep in what turned out to be a4-year old’s bed (Snoid lost that one!).
Must get better at reading the small print!
Thursday ~ our day of comics ~ started at a reasonable hour and we grabbed some coffee and croissants on the 50-minute walk downhill to the Pompidou for our 11am entry.
Just look at the exhibitions our ticket allowed us access to!
Taking the great glass escalator up, we passed the Library with its promise of a Hugo Pratt retrospective we paused our ascent before the big show on the top floor and started on the main floor for the museum’s permanent collection.
We were delighted to find so many comic pages displayed between the stunning paintings of modern art in the exhibition of THE COMICS AT THE MUSEUM (curated by Anne Lemonnier) ~ a surprise treat as Snoid and I had thought we were ‘only’ going to see the COMICS 1964-2024 (Laurent Le Bon, Xavier Rey, Christine Carrier and Frank Madlener) displays we’d both been drooling over the Thames & Hudson catalogue of.
(covers and contents pages below)
The galleries of the Pompidou’s permanent collection are a series of connected rooms (‘reading’ counterintuitively right to left) that takes the visitor on a whistlestop tour of 20th Century fine art. An enthusiast can spend all morning lost in the paintings and sculptures… it takes even longer now these works have been interspersed with examples of comics art. The curators show us a plethora of great pages that share stylistic approaches with or speak directly to/about the great art already on display.
The side corridors are given over to comic greats from the early years of the form. Lots of sketches and pages to linger over…
It’s no shock to see those foundational comic strip/book artists holding their own in terms of draughtsmanship among such august company, but refreshing to see the ways they reflect social issues of their day complement those of the slower art we are used to seeing in museums.
George McManus.
(details from) Bringing Up Father pages sit near the drawings of George Grosz.
Comics pages sitting proudly alongside world-famous paintings…
Of course there would be Windsor McCay pages!
It’s cool to see the originals next to the printed pages… these were full size newspapers, so you can see how the scale of the original art (somewhere between A2 and A1) allowed for the wealth of detail and perfect lines McCay was famous for.
George Herriman. ‘Nuff said!
Up close, you can see the scratching out for corrections…
Joann Sfar seems to draw comics directly into books
It’s striking how much better (for me) the comics of David B work when seen all at once. Admire his skills as much as I do, the pages of a printed book diminish the impact somehow. Seeing them on a wall like this is quite a different experience…
I‘d read of Calvo’s La Bete est Morte! way back in the 80’s boom, when every comic was seen through the lens of Alan Moore or Maus. Never was able to find a copy ~ how exciting to find a number of original pages on display here (and a French-language copy in the museum bookshop)!
There are a number of artist biography graphic novels knocking around these days ~ and more than one telling the life of René Magritte. Many are great, but they aren’t my cup of tea, on the whole.
These pages by Eric Lambé, on the other hand, have added a new title to my Wants List.
How good do the comics of Edmond Baudoin look next to Antonin Artaud?
The cardboard city of Seth traveled over from Canada…
The original art of childhood-favourite Sempé…
Having started our visit at 11am it was already after two and we were Starvin’ Marvin, so we closed out the ‘morning’ after checking out these Mattotti pictures.
There were many MANY artists and pages on display not mentioned above and sadly we knew we were leaving a few spots unseen, but food and drink called.
Centre Pompidou has a fancy restaurant and a funky coffee shop, but we craved something in between. After checking our tickets would allow us back in if we left, we ventured out into the brightening afternoon…
90 minutes was enough for a hearty meal and a 15 minute walk over Île de la Cité (wave to Notre Dame, looking much better than my last visit ~ from the outside the renovations from the fire are going well) to the best comic shop in Paris: Aaapoum Bapoum at 14 rue Serpente.
SWAG!
Aaapoum Bapoum is a veritable treasure trove for comics enthusiasts. To the right of the shop there is a lifetime’s worth of current, recent and historic BD albums at good prices, displayed by artist and some sort of thematic sorting.
On the left is the ever-expanding manga offering, and in the back room US comics in English and translation.
Downstairs are second-hand bookshop style piles of albums and journals (magazines) going back decades and on sale for a few euros a’piece.
I can read French comics well enough (although understanding the nuance of what the words mean is tricky, the cadence and gist get me a long way… and there’s always the translate button on a phone!), but the appeal of these sorts of things is in the visuals!
Machine by Gabriel Delmas has a touch of the Jeffrey Catherine Jones to it and Lucas Nine on Borges was clearly bitten by a radioactive Breccia as a child!
A nice bonus in the basement was chatting to fellow browser, American Matt Battaglia, creator of the recent House on Fire graphic novel.
And so back through the busy streets of Paris for Round 2 at Le Pompidou.
Top floor this time for the BIG exhibition…
And big is too small a word for the COMICS 1964-2024 show, if we are being honest.
As a compulsive pilgrim to any and every comics-related exhibition I can find, I rarely leave a gallery without wishing there had been just a little more work on display… definitely not the case here!
Room after room after room offers up brilliant comics work with multiple examples from every creator featured.
Original sketches.
Finished pages.
Printed examples.
Giant graphics.
The galleries were busy but not so crowded you had to wait for more than one or two other visitors to clear off so you could get a close up look at a piece.
If we feared there would be a degree of eurosnobbery to the exhibits, despite the American work on show a floor down, the mix of US comic books and manga in with the European 9th Artworks quickly put the lie to that.
Comics is a universal language and these walls of great artwork from all around the globe made light of any language barriers and demonstrated how many fascinations and concerns people of all countries share.
Art museums often glory in the exoticism of The Other, but here was a convincing argument that artists and audiences across cultures have more in common than sets them apart.
Will comics save the world?
No. No, they won’t. Don’t be silly.
But they’re a bloody welcome oasis to nourish the soul!
One room had free-hanging displays we could walk around and between. The work in here was cartoony humour comics and the juxtapositions of pratfalls and slapstick from different creators and languages made me smile in a way that I don’t think would have happened if I saw them one at a time. I approached this large Benito Jacovitti sheet from the back and found the shapes and colours quite charming. Seen from the front, Ridete, prego (Laugh, please) is a big silly crowd scene.
The Underground and Adult sections showed some of the impact comics have had on design and pop culture beyond being source material for Hollywood to milk and fine artists to look down their noses (at their bank statements) at.
These individual panels from Barbarella are each the size of an LP.
Mr Snoid, my travelling companion for scale next to the big pages of Druillet.
All that noodly detail still looks bonkers obsessive at original size!
We looked out the window at the dark night sky and realised it was 9pm already. Too late to return to the BD au Musee floor for the bits we’d skipped earlier as that part of the centre was closing up. But still time (the centre itself was open till 11) to do a rapid tour of the Hugo Pratt celebration on the library floor…
The exhibition space there ~ free to enter without a ticket even ~ is pretty large (any comickers who saw the Posy Simmonds retrospective in January will know this space alone is bigger than most museums will devote to our field).
Pratt’s work is so much like the printed results that, much as he is one of my favourites, it was easy to zip through here. Stopping mostly to check out the paintings and sketches and feel amazed by his prolific virtuosity.
We finally left Centre Pompidou for perhaps the last time (it closes for a five year refurbishment in 2025 and such projects always provoke a sense of unease) around 10pm. Eleven hours of head-spinning cultural immersion. If we’d stopped to read every label, let alone every speech balloon, we’d have needed another eleven!
A nice supper, followed by a couple of drinks idly watching young Parisians smoking and laughing and pairing off ~ or failing to. Then a boozy stagger back to Montmartre beckoned to get some kip before an 11am Eurostar back to Blighty.
This mural?/grafitti?/accident? en route was obviously an abstract comic waiting for us to enjoy.
Salut, Centre Pompidou. I’ve loved visiting over the years, and this was a fine send off. At time of writing, there is still a month remaining to catch this breathtaking exhibition. I strongly recommend you do if you can.
Just take some water and a snack. And maybe one of those folding chairs. And a credit card ~ because that bookshop in the museum will fill your bag even if you don’t make it out to one of the French capital’s fine comic shops.
NOTE: most of the artist links in this blog take you to the excellent Lambiek website ~ a great resource for comics information and a wonderful comic shop in its own right… albeit in Amsterdam rather than Paris)
