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All white and shaped like an overturned ship sliced in two, the Portzamparc landmark is magni!cent enough. Belgium’s !rst

building by the Pritzker Prize-winning Frenchman, whose other notable achievements include the Cité de la Musique in Paris and Luxembourg’s Philharmonie, will not be his last: the architect recently won a competition to redesign Brussels’ European quarter.

Hergé Museum director Laurent De Froberville is delighted with with his new workplace: “It’s simple, clear and very pure. Although the building is massive, it has a very light feeling. The windows are arranged so that walking into this place is like entering the page of a comic book.” The museum is a monument to the comic strip as an art form; an ode, more speci!cally, to the

ligne claire – Hergé’s signature style. The permanent collection is arrayed

thematically in eight galleries: Hergé’s life, work, the characters he created (not only global reporter Tintin and his friends and foes, but also archetypical Brussels ketjes Quick & Flupke) and some of the real-life inspirations for them. Other rooms are dedicated to Hergé’s fascination with science and to his international popularity.

Warts and all Sensitive subjects will also be covered. For instance, the section focusing on Hergé as an employer and studio head deals with the impact of his frequent bouts of depression on the workings of his team, says Alain De Kuyssche of Moulinsart, the administrative divi-sion of Hergé’s estate. Led by Hergé’s widow Fanny Vlaminck Rodwell and her husband Nick Rodwell, the estate is the driving force behind the museum and owner of virtually all of the work to be seen within.

Will the same spirit of openness and honesty extend to the treatment of Hergé’s political leanings? Like many young Catholics growing up in the 1920s and ’30s, Hergé came under the spell of far right-leaning factions of the Church. Their in"uence is detectable in the early Tintin albums, which con-tain elements of racism and evince a disdainful colonialist attitude.

Hergé, whose given name was Georges Remi (1907–1983), eventually left the narrow-minded milieu of his beginnings, but accusations stuck, and mistakes proved hard to undo. In the Tintin album The Shooting Star (1942), a character named ‘Blumenstein’ is an evil !nancier and obviously a Jew. In subsequent editions, Hergé tried to remedy the faux-pas by changing the name to ‘Bohlwinkel’ – ‘candy store’ in Brussels dialect. No luck. He would !nd out later – had his unconscious played a trick on him? – that ‘Bollwinkel’ was in fact a Jewish name.

When asked how the museum will deal with this prickly subject, De Froberville says, “We don’t want to hide anything, but on the other hand, the museum serves a di#erent purpose. Excellent books have been written on this subject. I recommend Philippe Goddin’s works. He goes into it all in detail and with great honesty. He also cooperated with us on our permanent collection. You know, there’s so much to say about Hergé, a great artist and humanist. But journalists are always drawn to these same subjects.”

O! the beaten track Why Louvain-la-Neuve? The o$cial answer is that the location is ideal for the project. In the 1950s, Hergé bought a house in nearby Céroux-Moustyand took this part of Walloon Brabant

Tintin marketersThe new Hergé Museum opens next week in an elegant building by star architect Christian de Portzamparc. Veerle Devos and Kristof Dams hopped on a train to

Louvain-la-Neuve to tour the premises and speak with the museum’s director

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as his model for many of the landscapes around Marlinspike Hall, the home of Captain Haddock and his permanent guest Tintin. That’s all well and good, but Brussels was Hergé’s birthplace and the setting of his other enduringly popular comic strip series, Quick & Flupke. The city plays a part in Tintin’s adven-tures too: for instance, all through the series, whenever Tintin is addressed on foreign shores in an incomprehen-sible local language, the exotic tongue is rendered in Marolles dialect. These passages are the same in all of the 140 translations and are thus decipher-able to only a tiny minority of read-ers – those from Hergé’s home town. Another less sentimental reason for questioning the choice of the museum’s location is the cold fact that Brussels

welcomes two million international tourists each year, whereas Louvain-la-Neuve, 30 kilometres to the southeast, gets practi-

cally none.Moulinsart did look for a Brussels

address. The open area behind Square Fontainas was considered for a while, as was the Luxembourg train station, in front of the European Parliament. What went wrong? De Kuyssche says that Brussels’ bureaucratic muddle of overlapping and warring authori-ties proved so labyrinthine that Fanny Rodwell eventually lost patience and hope. City o$cials retort that Hergé’s heirs were too demanding.

Whatever the circumstances, it remains that Louvain-la-Neuve, a uni-versity town, beat the capital of Europe at the game of netting a new cultural

attraction housed in a top-notch piece of architecture. Indeed, the munici-pality of Ottignies, of which Louvain-la-Neuve is a part, proved particularly adept at making the first overtures, o#ering a plot of land and relaxing the town’s strict building code to accommo-date the project. As a result, the Hergé Museum is one of the few structures in Louvain-la-Neuve which is not clad in the prescribed red brick. The town can now sit back and see whether the famed “Bilbao e#ect” will take hold.

Help from HollywoodBrussels, meanwhile, has missed out on an %18-million architectural land-mark dedicated to its most popular cultural icon. International tourists have lost out too. Eventually, Louvain-la-Neuve will become a stop on the new regional RER railway network, but for now, trains serving the town are slow, and roads are congested. This may explain why the Hergé Museum has set a target !gure of 200,000 visitors per year, compared to the 600,000-to- 1 million visitors anticipated by the new Magritte Museum in Brussels.

It must be acknowleged that Hergé, and especially his beloved character Tintin, has su$cient drawing power to o#set minor inconveniences. The release in 2011 of Secret of the Unicorn, the !rst part of a Tintin !lm trilogy directed by Steven Spielberg, should greatly increase the museum’s poten-tial audience. De Froberville hopes that the !lms will !nally win Tintin a strong following in the US, where the feisty Belgian cub reporter is still little known.

Spielberg’s plans to turn Tintin into a movie go back to the early 1980s. Hergé, who died in 1983 only days before a meeting with the Hollywood director, had greatly enjoyed E.T. and trusted Spielberg. “It will be a di#erent Tintin,” he said, “but a good Tintin.” The future of the Hergé empire and the new museum may depend upon that.

The Hergé Museum, 26 Rue du Labrador, Louvain-la-Neuve, from June 2, Tuesday to Sunday, 10.00 to 18.00, tel 02.626.24.21, www.tintin.com

Open!ng soon

Tintin sets out: plate I of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, 1929, the very !rst Tintin adventure, published in Le Petit Vingtième

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