Tintin in the house

�� Herg��-Moulinsart 2015/Somerset House - Installation image

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

���What if I told you that I put my whole life into Tintin?��� asked Herg�� shortly before he died in 1983. The man who revolutionized the cartoon strip and influenced the work of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol is the subject of a nice little exhibition at Somerset House, Tintin: Herg�����s masterpiece (admission free, until January 31, 2016). There is also a book to accompany the exhibition (published by Rizzoli).

As the publicity claims, the exhibition enables us to step ���inside the wonderfully eccentric world of artist-author Herg�� and Tintin, his intrepid young reporter��� (who, it should be said, never files a report or ages a day across his twenty-four books). The walls of the three rooms replicate the famous pastel-blue and white inside covers of the albums. There are also models of Captain Haddock���s chateau, Moulinsart (Marlinspike Hall in the English edition), and of Tintin���s anonymous apartment in Brussels. Herg�����s interest in architecture and design can be seen in the many precise drawings on display, many of views from windows. As Michael Farr points out in his indispensable Tintin:The complete companion (2001), everything was drawn as close to life as possible, from Bauhaus chairs to ships��� rigging.

The Glengarry of Glasgow was used as a model for the Karaboudjan (from Michael Farr's Tintin: The complete companion

The last time the cub reporter floated into public consciousness was with the appearance of Steven Spielberg���s shockingly bad computer-animated film The Adventures of Tintin (2011). Spielberg had harboured an ambition to film a Tintin adventure for over three decades and Herg�� reckoned that he was the only director ���who could ever do Tintin justice��� (in the words of Herg�����s biographer Pierre Assouline,"he considered Spielberg a genius"), so disappointment at the result was felt all the more keenly by Tintinophiles. Herg�� had agreed to Spielberg���s request for "sole artistic and commercial control of the project", which might explain the ill-judged liberties the director took with the stories. (A superb theatrical version of Herg�����s own favourite Tintin in Tibet, in London in 2006, revealed how adaptable his work can be.)

Meanwhile, Herg�����s star shows no sign of waning: a drawing from Tintin in the Congo sold at auction in Paris recently for ���770,000.