I have always been a fan of Leuven as a city, so when my friends invited me to visit Louvain-la-Neuve, I had my expectations riding high for the space and energy that it exudes. And sure, art is subjective, but I personally found Louvain-la-Neuve brimming with artistic and architectural marvels, almost as if to break the monotony of a college-driven town, which it very well is.
The city feels young and more colorful than most other Belgian towns. A benefit of which is great restaurants as well, and while we planned on a small lunch, we spent well over 2 hours poring over a variety of crêpes, milkshakes, and cheese platters. The best flavours we found were with artichoke and spinach, both being new dishes for all of us, so that's a good sign if we all like it.
This was followed by a much-needed walk towards the city park, where we found the Hergé Museum. The best news here being the fact that it is completely free to visit every first Sunday of the month, so we just had to take the opportunity to explore it!
Ever since I first read Tintin as a child, I have been obsessed with comic books and storytelling. This is what brought me to the Hergé Museum in Louvain-la-Neuve. When this eye-catching architecture was being planned, Mr. Portzamparc decided to give it a levitating appearance close to the woods rather than the city center, with multiple long windows as an homage to the comic strips that Hergé is renowned for. What caught my eye especially is the layout of all the rooms inside—it feels very free-flowing and almost surreal as a museum, where the building itself is a part of the art we can appreciate.
A fun fact about the name Hergé is that it is the phonetic initials of his actual name, Remy Georges, in French, which we say "R G," and a lot of his art is also found in advertisement campaigns beyond the comic strips.
An unsurprising character trait of Hergé is his curiosity for different cultures, and he is known to visit different museums and sculpture exhibitions to gain inspiration for his comics. This has also led to controversial artwork in his stories, for example in Asian and Middle Eastern cultures, since he often exaggerated the facts for plots.
At some points in the museum, we could even see the pencil-sketched comics in Hergé's own hand, which once again humanized the hard work behind every page. He was, of course, assisted by multiple talented illustrators at one stage in his career, but I do appreciate the effort in his art that helped him achieve that privilege.
As we move from room to room in the museum, you begin to acknowledge the consistency of all the well-written characters that still hold their value and principles in the first comic as they do in the latest. We even see a video explanation of Hergé and his colleagues that help to maintain strong lore-specific character profiles, though Eurocentric but true to their reality at the time. It is arguable to say that the ideas spread in a medium such as comics are so easy to digest that they are easy to spread, and with The Adventures of Tintin having sold nearly 200 million copies in nearly 110 languages, we can say that Belgium had an important role in ideating the future mentality of the world. This is before the internet, of course, so I reckon we can begin to see Hergé as the prime influencer of his era.
By the time you exit the museum, I am certain that you'll carry a newfound appreciation not just for Hergé but for any comic artist that devotes so much time and energy to their art, and maybe that is the greatest achievement of a museum after all.
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