| I enjoy the Tintin books more now than I did as a kid, partly because the alternative of reading Archie’s Gag Bag seems less alluring than once it did, and partly because my canny adult brain is now capable of appreciating the depth of the Belgian writer and artist George (Hergé) Remi’s creativity and attention to detail.
London’s National Maritime Museum in Greenwich seems an unlikely venue for an exhibition devoted to a father of graphic novels, but boaties and nautical buffs disagree. In fact, it’s the rare Tintin adventure that doesn’t feature at least one sea vessel and a series of salty exclamations from Tintin’s barnacled chum, Captain Haddock.
Hergé’s ships – particularly those in The Red Sea Sharks and Red Rackham’s Treasure – were always based on specific models, and he copied them in painstaking detail from National Geographic photos, nautical magazines and scale models. Tintin’s interest in astronomy, navigation and technology allegedly mirrors Hergé’s, and the tools the boy reporter uses to fight crime – an early diving suit, earphones, naval navigation tools and depth gauges – were all based on instruments Hergé had seen and found compelling. The recurring character Prof. Calculus was probably based on Hergé’s contemporary, a Brussels professor named Auguste Piccard, whose fascination with fish-shaped, one-man submarines should ring a bell with any Tintin fan.
Art doesn’t just imitate life in this tribute to Hergé. The museum’s lobby contains a truly eye-catching, life-sized working model of the shark-shaped submarine that Tintin uses to hunt for Red Rackham’s treasure. The machine (which more closely resembles a cheerful orca than a shark) was constructed five years ago by French shipbuilding students as a diploma-course project.
Across town is another spectacular sight. All 150 photographs from Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Earth From the Air series have been printed as large as possible and displayed in the Natural History Museum’s outdoor courtyard. The collection of photos, which have been exhibited numerous times and comprise an immensely popular coffee table book, are the first instalment in an ongoing UNESCO-sponsored project which was conceived by Bertrand in 1995. What he initiated as a fin de siecle attempt to inventory the planet using aerial photography has since expanded into a significant artistic and ecological undertaking.
Each photo is intended to have a sociopolitical and environmental meaning. The subject matter that conveys meaning is hugely varied: a river delta, massive glaciers, trees, crowds, sand dunes, a flood in Bangladesh, an open-air slaughterhouse in Africa, storm-flattened houses in Florida. Each photo is presented along with its GPS co-ordinates, opening the project to other photographers who can revisit sites or add their own images.
This exhibition also has the unique merit of being accessible to the blind and visually impaired. Thirty of the photographs have been rendered in cellulose acetate, based on black and white scans of the originals. The images have been interpreted in relief using precision etching techniques, and the result is a row of photographs that can be seen through the fingertips.
While these renderings lack some impact for the non-touch literate, they’ve proven a popular and original idea that – if arguably not as thrilling as seeing the photos visually – certainly accords with Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s desire for his work to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible.
When the same technique is applied to Tintin drawings, the world will be perfect.
The Natural History Museum’s Earth From the Air is now closed, but the National Maritime Museum’s Tintin exhibition is on until September 5. |
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