High Comics Art The Louvre and the Bande Dessinée

Margaret C. Flinn

Abstract

This article concerns the eight albums currently available in a series of bandes dessinées commissioned by the Louvre from established, well-respected bédéistes and co-published with Futuropolis since 2005. This successful, high-profile series has elicited positive critical response, but that response has also exposed persistent mutual antagonisms between bande dessinée and the establishment art world as represented by the Louvre Museum. These tensions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture can be read within the narratives of the albums themselves, in which we see reflexivity used to highlight bande dessinée’s artistic value, and various types of obstruction and sensory impairments (realist and supernatural) are used to disrupt quotidian relationships to museum space.

Keywords: Christian Durieux, David Prudhomme, Enki Bilal, Éric Liberge, Louvre Museum, Nicolas de Crécy, Marc-Antoine Mathieu, reflexivity

In 2005, Louvre Éditions initiated a bande dessinée series co-published with Futuropolis that has since seen approximately annual additions. To date, the series is comprised of: Nicolas de Crécy, Période glaciaire (2005); Marc-Antoine Mathieu, Les Sous-sols du Révolu: Extraits du journal d’un expert (2006); Éric Liberge, Aux heures impaires (2008); Yslaire and Carrière, Le Ciel au-dessus du Louvre (2009); Hirohiko Araki, Rohan au Louvre (2010); Christian Durieux, Un Enchantement (2011); David Prudhomme, La Traversée du Louvre [Crossing the Louvre] (2012); and Enki Bilal, Les Fantômes du Louvre [The Ghosts of the Louvre] (2012).1 True to the bande dessinée’s contemporary popular genres, these

1 English editions have been put out by the Louvre and NBM Publishing of New York as follows: Crécy, Glacial Period (2007); Mathieu, The Museum Vaults: Excerpts from the Journal of an Expert (2008); Liberge, On the Odd Hours (2010); Yslaire and Carrière, The Sky over the Louvre (2011); Araki, Rohan at the Louvre (2012); and Durieux, An Enchantment (2013). Further translations are forthcoming. As this article goes to press, Étienne Davodeau, Le Chien qui Louche (2013) is being released in France.

European Comic Art Volume 6 Number 2, Autumn 2013: 69–94 doi:10.3167/eca.2013.060204 ISSN 1754–3797 (Print), ISSN 1754–3800 (Online)

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albums are frequently fantastic stories, but the series already includes a number of different genres, and its various stories have looked both backwards and forwards in time, as well as at the present. The albums share a fascination with what we might call ‘hidden’ or ‘buried’ histories; histories of the museum’s paintings, of its functions or of the site itself. These texts are not necessarily radically innovative in that, stylistically, they all bear close resemblance to their artists’ other work, but they are all smart, rich and insightful considerations of the value of and possibilities for the contemporary museum, as well as of the relationship between bande dessinée and cultural institutions. One could be purist and say that it is more important to see what the bande dessinée does with its ‘own’ cultural institutions, but this particular corpus is an interesting object of study precisely because the stature of the Louvre Museum dictates certain socio-cultural terms, and has granted a particular kind of visibility to the series. In taking on the ensemble of the series for this article, I am not trying to make exaggerated (and indeed untenable) claims for a unified aesthetic, or monolithically shared problématiques. What remains striking, however, is the degree to which the Louvre albums do share certain preoccupations and tendencies. Analyzing those shared tendencies will be my purpose here.2

While the Louvre series has not been universally adored by its readers, each album (and its translation) has been, overall, quite well received across a range of publications (mainstream press, specialized cultural publications, dedicated bande dessinée websites and blogs, and reviewer comments/ratings sections on commercial sites [again, general and specialized]). However, there is a certain disposition within this reception

2 The history of the Louvre’s interactions with and representations in popular culture or across artistic media is beyond the scope of this article, but would of course be a fascinating line of enquiry thanks to the variety of these intersections. These include, within the rubric of ‘popular’ or ‘mass’ culture itself, tensions between types of media as well as dramatic differences between ‘popular’ vs. ‘art/experimental’ or ‘pedagogical’ productions. In a much broader study of representations, one might consider Tardi’s Adèle Blanc-Sec series from the 1970s (early volumes involve the Louvre and other Parisian monuments), along with Luc Besson’s film adaptation of albums from the series, entitled Les Aventures extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-sec [The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec] (2010); Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part [Band of Outsiders] (1964); Bernando Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003); and Belphégor ou le fantôme du Louvre [Belphegor, Phantom of the Louvre], both a 1965 television mini-series starring Juliette Gréco and a 2001 navet by Jean-Paul Salomé based on the 1927 policier by Arthur Bernède. From a production standpoint, one might compare/contrast the Louvre-commissioned/produced Tsai Ming-liang film, Visage [Face] (2009), as well as any number of documentaries, notably Nicolas Philibert’s La Ville Louvre [Louvre City] (1990).

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to reproduce high/low art dichotomies – while commenting on a project that is precisely supposed to be bridging or disassembling such a dichotomy (never mind that the post-modern was supposed to have already signalled the collapse of popular vs. elite modes of cultural production). The books have been successful: ‘critiques dithryambiques et 55,000 exemplaires vendus’ [rave reviews and 55,000 volumes sold], as Télérama reported in 2009 of the series’ kick-off volume.3 The model of national historical monument/institution commissioning albums of serious artistic quality (not just pedestrian, pedagogical gift shop souvenir volumes) has in fact subsequently been emulated by Versailles. Versailles, Tome 1: Le Crépuscule du Roy, by Éric Adam, Didier Donvard and Éric Liberge, appeared in October 2012, the first of a projected trilogy jointly published by Versailles and Glénat.4

The series’ initiating editor, Fabrice Douar, has explained the Louvre series project thus:

[F]aciliter la création d’une passerelle entre le monde de la bande dessinée et celui des musées, mondes jusqu’à présent plutôt étanches l’un à l’autre, voire hostile. . . . L’intérêt est de donner carte blanche à la création et l’imag-inaire, afin d’instaurer un dialogue vivant et contemporain entre le musée et l’artiste.

[To facilitate the creation of a bridge between the world of comics and that of museums, worlds that up to this point have been fairly impervious to each other, if not hostile. . . . The interest is to give free rein to creation and the imaginary, in order to open up a lively and contemporary dialogue between the museum and the artist.]5

Published artists’ interviews confirm this carte blanche story. Even the usually publisher-dictated page length and measurements have been waived.6 My starting point, then, is as follows: if the only obligation is somehow to engage the Louvre Museum and its collections, then any thematic or formal traits that recur across the series say something

3 Stéphane Jame, ‘Objectif Louvre’, Télérama 3094, http://www.telerama.fr/scenes/objectif-louvre,39378.php (posted 21 February 2009, accessed 28 October 2012).

4 Glénat has also nearly simultaneously published the translation, Versailles: Twilight of the King.

5 All translations are my own unless otherwise specified. Cited by Yan Hamel, ‘Eudes le Volumeur au Musée du Louvre’, Spirale 217 (2007), 8.

6 Hirohiko Araki’s contribution takes notable advantage of such liberty by respecting the Japanese right-to-left order of reading, although the page size of Rohan au Louvre is larger than that of a normal manga, and the colour volume is hardcover. Araki is as yet the only artist outside of the Franco-Belgian tradition to contribute to the series. His inclusion is symptomatic of the rising popularity of manga in French comics culture since the mid-1990s – as well as, one might cynically imagine, the popularity of the Louvre with Japanese tourists.

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about the way in which the Franco-Belgian bande dessinée relates to this monument of the French cultural patrimony and vice versa.

In Comics versus Art, Bart Beaty uses a series of case studies from the North American and English-speaking contexts to ‘demonstrate how, in an increasingly postmodern world in which the distinction between high and low culture is often assumed to have been eroded, outmoded biases continue to persist in the shaping of how we understand culture broadly’.7 One of the central preoccupations of this article is to establish how the Louvre-Futuropolis series demonstrates similar biases and, indeed, antagonisms between the cultural fields of bande dessinée and the art world as represented by the Louvre Museum. I will show how one of the dominant, shared tendencies within the series is reflexivity (particularly mise en abyme) – here understood as a strategy that validates the ninth art as an art. Then, I will examine how the series stages various types of disruptions to an individual’s ‘normal’, quotidian relationship to the museum space as a means of better revealing the value of art, suggesting that the use of both reflexivity and disruptions works as a thematic and formal analogy for the discourse about the crossing of high and low culture to be found in the critical reception of the series.

One symptom of the reinforcement of a high/low opposition is the way the Louvre albums seem to be better serving the purposes of introducing an elite, museum-going, ‘high culture’ public to the bande dessinée than they are at attracting the bande dessinée public to the museum – that is, presuming that these are necessarily different publics, but the commentators do tend to present themselves as belonging to one or the other. The bande dessinée here works as an art outside of the authorizing context of the museum, with a separate social context. Since online critics are often anonymous or give only minimal cues to their level of knowledge of different spheres it is not possible to be sure, but with that caveat, the following picture does emerge: commentators who seem to know bande dessinée for the most part critique story line, art and formal aspects of the albums, but they are not terribly interested in the representation of the Louvre itself within that story. At the time of Christian Durieux’s Un Enchantement, a number of commentators offhandedly mentioned that the album made them want to go to the Louvre (such as one blog critic who opens her review, ‘Il n’y pas que les Journées du Patrimoine qui donnent envie d’aller au musée’ [It’s not only Heritage Days that make one want to go

7 Bart Beaty, Comics versus Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 7.

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to the museum]),8 but none of them say they actually ended up going. One blogger wrote ‘Ouvrir [Un Enchantement], c’est ouvrir le Louvre comme on aimerait le découvrir’ [Opening [Un Enchantement] is to open the Louvre like one would like to discover it],9 with a conditional tense that implies that the museum simply cannot live up to what the bande dessinée offers. Another reviewer (this time of La Traversée du Louvre) suggests:

Est-ce pour autant la marque d’un rendez-vous manqué avec cette incar-nation [of the bédéiste’s partner] ou d’une conversation en ce lieu qui fait album? Vu la qualité de l’œuvre, plutôt une manière de dire que décidément en neuvième chose tout se passe dans la tête, lieu du verbe, lieu du regard. Pourquoi continuerait-on à chercher dans un musée?

[Is it for all that the mark of a missed connection with that incarnation [of the bédéiste’s partner], or of a truncated conversation in this place that makes the album? Considering the quality of the work, it’s rather a way of saying that decidedly in the ninth realm everything happens in one’s head, the place of language, the place of the gaze. Why would one continue to look for it in a museum?]10

The museum is thus seen as troublesomely excessive and unnecessary – across the series the game of engaging the museum itself is occasionally remarked upon as being heavy-handed or the least interesting aspect of the text. The project itself is suggested to be a facile (if successful) ‘coup de pub’ [publicity stunt] by one blogger,11 while another’s language suggests a lingering hostility towards the gesture made by

une direction éditoriale sachant relier l’étrange carrefour qu’est [Période glaci-aire], entre deux cultures, mais aussi un éditeur en recherche de ce supplé-ment d’âme culturel qui lui manque tant, et une institution qui veut, qui doit, démocratiser la culture classique et voit soudain cette panacée dans un médium ‘jeune’ et populaire par sa forme et sa mythologie.

[an editorial board knowing how to draw together the strange crossroads that is [Période glaciaire], between two cultures, but also an editor seeking

8 Sarah Despoisse, ‘Christian Durieux: Un enchantement’, Culturopoing.com, http://culturopoing.com/Livres/Christian+Durieux+Un+Enchantement+-4294 (posted 11 September 2011, accessed 29 October 2012).

9 Olwen, ‘Fiche 1041: Un enchantement’, CriticBlog: Le Blog-Notes, http://blog.librairie-critic.fr/blog/Fiche-n-1041-Un-Enchantement-Christian-Durieux-Ed-Futuropolis (posted 7 December 2011, accessed 29 October 2012).

10 Jessie Bi, ‘La Traversée du Louvre’, http://www.du9.org/chronique/la-traversee-du-louvre/ (posted June 2012, accessed 29 October 2012).

11 Hannibal, ‘Période glaciaire/Nicolas de Crécy’, http://hanniballelecteur.over-blog.com/article-21258893.html (posted 8 July 2008, accessed 28 October 2012).

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that supplemental cultural soul that it was so lacking, and an institution that wants to, that must, democratize classical culture and suddenly sees its panacea in a medium that is ‘young’ and popular both in form and mythology.]12

The reference to the bande dessinée’s ‘mythology’ indicates that the author does not necessarily believe that the Louvre’s possibly cynical attempt to appropriate ‘cool points’ from the ninth art will necessarily succeed as imagined.

When the bande dessinée appeared in the Louvre, there was a parallel mismatch between stated attempt and viewer/reader appreciation as to when the Louvre appeared in bande dessinée. Bart Beaty’s review (in the pages of this very journal) of the 2009 exhibition held at the Louvre and dedicated to the then four published or forthcoming volumes concluded: ‘Overall, the show was a resounding disappointment, offering few real insights into either comics or the Louvre itself, and sadly reaffirming dominant cultural hierarchies rather than challenging them.’13 The (reasonable) reproaches made to the exhibit included the pittance of gallery space and uninspired presentation.

The second of the two Louvre exhibitions related to the series, this time featuring works from Enki Bilal’s Les Fantômes du Louvre in the winter of 2012–2013, provides a somewhat more complex case, in that Bilal is (already) an established part of the contemporary art world, regularly exposing canvases and figuring prominently in various gallery and institutional exhibitions.14 Bilal’s outsized stature was commercially demarcated by the publication of a luxury, limited (numbered) edition of Les Fantômes du Louvre and a ‘three ghost dossier’ (dramatically more and less expensive than the 25-euro bande dessinée, respectively). The vast majority of reviewers viewed the exhibition favourably, and considered it de rigueur that Bilal be given his own, small exhibit on the occasion of the album’s release – as Télérama’s reviewer put it, ‘Quoi de plus normal que d’exposer les toiles composant le livre d’Enki Bilal, Les

12 Jessie Bi, ‘Période glacière’, http://www.du9.org/chronique/periode-glaciaire (posted November 2005, accessed 28 October 2012).

13 Bart Beaty, ‘Musée du Louvre, Paris: Exhibit’, European Comic Art 2(1) (2009), 162. 14 At the time of this writing, for instance, Bilal is both subject and curator of a small but

compelling exhibition, Mécanhumanimal, at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris (4 June 2013–5 January 2014). The exhibit is a particularly effective combination of objects from the museum’s regular collections, original canvases and installation works that interact with those objects, video interviews around the exhibit’s theme with various individuals (excerpts, with complete videos available on the exhibit’s website), and plates from Bilal’s comics. For more information, see http://enkibilal.arts-et-metiers.net (accessed 15 July 2013).

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Fantômes du Louvre, dans le musée qui les a inspiré [sic]?’ [What could be more normal than showing the canvases that make up Enki Bilal’s book Les Fantômes du Louvre in the museum that inspired them?].15 The Bilal exhibit did, however, elicit negative reactions from those who dislike Bilal’s ‘cold’ style in general (this tended not, however, to be a criticism of the exhibit itself), as well as this vicious post on the Louvre’s own exhibit website addressed to ‘Monsieur Fabrice Douar’:

Bilal au Louvre. Vous en portez la responsabilité. Ce projet est une insulte à l’Histoire, à l’art, aux artistes, à la critique, à l’esthétique et au simple bon sens. C’est une insulte à nos capacités de connaissance, d’appréciation, de savoir et de discernement. C’est une insulte au Louvre comme à celles et ceux qui, depuis des siècles, se sont mobilisés pour en faire la vitrine de la création que les siècles nous ont léguée.

Vous avez cédé à la pression de ce versant de notre modernité qui monnaye son image et celles qu’elle produit et s’emploie à subvertir les insti-tutions pour en recueillir reconnaissance et marché.

A supposer que vous ayez vu une œuvre de Vinci, de Poussin, de Chardin, de Goya, vous n’en avez rien retenu. La preuve, vous rangez Bilal dans le même Panthéon; vous confondez œuvre et écume; vous confondez pensée à l’œuvre et démarche populiste; tout discernement critique vous manque et ce qui ravit les adolescents actuels ne saurait être sur le champ l’objet de l’onction institutionnelle. Le Louvre!

[Bilal in the Louvre. You are responsible for this. This project is an insult to History, to art, to artists, to criticism, to aesthetics and to basic common sense. It is an insult to our capacities for knowledge, appreciation, and discernment. It is an insult to the Louvre, as well as to those who, for centu-ries, have been working to make it the showcase of creativity that we have inherited from the ages.

You have caved to the pressure from that part of our modernity that assigns financial worth to its images and works at subverting institutions in order to collect fame and market value.

Imagining that you have seen a work of Da Vinci, Poussin, Chardin, De Goya, you have learned nothing from it. The proof is that you put Bilal in the same Pantheon: you are confusing work and fluff, you are confusing thought at work and populist approach. You are completely lacking in critical judgment and that which thrills contemporary adolescents should not receive immediate institutional annointment. The Louvre!]16

15 Oliver Granoux, ‘Enki Bilal: Les Fântomes du Louvre’, Télérama.fr, http://sortir.telerama.fr/evenements/expos/enki-bilal-les-fantomes-du-louvre,96970.php (posted 8 January 2013, accessed 15 July 2013).

16 See the comments section of the ‘Exposition: Les Fantômes du Louvre: Enki Bilal’ webpage on the Louvre’s website at: http://www.louvre.fr/expositions/art-contemporain-les-fantomes-du-louvre-enki-bilal (posted 4 February 2013, accessed 15 July 2013).

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Following another paragraph disparaging the quality of Bilal’s art, the post concludes:

Bilal convient aux étals des marchands de BD. Vous lui avez offert le Louvre. Et la confusion des niveaux, des esprits, du sens des œuvres, porte désor-mais un nom, le vôtre. Comment peut-on, à votre place, rabaisser ainsi le niveau de ce que l’art cherche et parvient à atteindre. Et ce propos n’est qu’un début.

Michel Pagnoux. Agrégé de l’Université, peintre, Directeur d’école d’art honoraire, essayiste. Les Augiers. 26460. Crupies.

[Bilal is appropriate for the stands of comic book merchants. You have given him the Louvre. And the confusion of level, of spirit, of the meaning of works, heretofore bears a name: yours. How can one, in your position, possibly diminish the level of that which art seeks and manages to attain? And this statement is only a beginning.

Michel Pagnoux. Holder of University Certification [Agrégation], painter, Honorary Director of Art School, essayist.]17

I cite Pagnoux’s tirade extensively because, while he may be an outlier guilty of the bad taste of a needless personal attack on a curator (and indeed he inspired spirited rebuttals further along in the website’s commentary), his vituperative comments illustrate the degree to which hostility towards bande dessinée as ‘bad’, ‘low’, ‘commercial’ art is exposed in critique that is ostensibly about a particular artist’s œuvre. Bilal here functions as a lightning rod, channelling larger assumptions about and positions on what art is – and indeed, the notion that certain types of art are ‘acceptable’ and others are not.18 Ironically, while insisting that the Louvre curator’s ‘lack of critical judgment’ diminishes the museum’s authority, Pagnoux seeks to reassert that authority from outside of this particular institution by endorsing himself with Institutional Qualifications (‘Agrégé de l’Université’, ‘Directeur d’école d’art honoraire’), but does so in the free-for-all register of Internet trolling. The site is, of course, monitored by the Louvre’s staff – commentary remains posted because they leave it there, promulgating the phantasm of the web as ur-democracy. The commentary on the status of contemporary art and its institutions to be found in the Louvre-Futuropolis series proves to be more effective and engaging than that of the website. Nonetheless, the accusatory or negatively connoted language to be found in the midst of reviews that are in fact overwhelmingly

17 Ibid. 18 And, it must be suspected, given the self-asserting qualifiers following Pagnoux’s

name, some professional rancor and jealousy. See also: http://www.michelpagnoux.com (accessed 15 July 2013).

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positive leads me to argue that the critical discourse around the series has in fact suffered from a similar reification of the very dichotomy that the project is ostensibly trying to break down. If we can agree that the Louvre-Futuropolis endeavour is characterized by a good faith attempt at dialogue, it often turns out to be a dialogue ‘de sourds’ [of the deaf ]. This confrontational stance is further visible in the repeated move to show bande dessinée as a valid art form through reflexivity and mise en abyme, as well as narrative violence enacted upon the institution and its representatives.

The reflexivity and mise en abyme in the Louvre-Futuropolis series are important because they implicitly and explicitly set up the bande dessinée as an art form and the album as equivalent and equal to the museum. That is to say, the deployment of reflexivity and mise en abyme, as I will detail in the following examples, repeatedly asserts the artistic value of bande dessinée, or of its constitutive formal elements. Individual fragments (single panels, panel groupings or pages) are enclosed within the album’s covers just like individual paintings, strategically grouped hangings or series of themed galleries are enclosed within the museum. This is not a simple and unimpeachable equation but rather a loose analogy that a number of the albums play with, as their characters move through the galleries during the course of their respective stories. The gallery space’s architectural fixedness plays off the mobility of artworks and visitors within those spaces much in the way that characters in the albums perform narrative movement throughout galleries (and that various formal elements cross gutters, establishing visual lines of flight within pages). We might, therefore, think of the museum as exhibiting a tension between the strong/rigid grid and the movement across that grid that Benoît Peeters considers central to his taxonomic analysis of comics form.19 Such movement may operate in a realistic mode, such as the ‘traversée’ accomplished by David Prudhomme’s bédéiste in La Traversée du Louvre, or a fantastic mode, such as the enervated gymnastics of the artworks’ souls as they are freed by deaf night watchman Bastien’s percussive music in Éric Liberge’s Aux heures impaires (Fig. 1). In La Traversée du Louvre, the reader follows the bédéiste as he walks from gallery to gallery looking for his girlfriend – the pace is neither extremely slow and contemplative nor frenetic, and panels are full of quirky observations of quotidian museum-goer behaviour. In Aux heures impaires, rippling sound lines

19 See Benoît Peeters, Case, planche, récit: Lire la bande dessinée [Frame, Page, Story: Reading Comics] ([Tournai]: Casterman, 1998).

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render Bastien’s drumming perceptible and dynamize the variably sized and formed panels, thus adding a layer of visible movement to the action of the artworks as they simultaneously move through the panels and galleries.

It is worth pointing out here that the Louvre’s choices of contributors are significant: all of the comics artists are well established and known as ‘complete artists’, that is, those who regularly compose both the story’s text and drawings. There is one collaboration, Yslaire and Carrière, but it was Bernard Yslaire’s choice to bring in Jean-Claude Carrière, a famous film screenwriter particularly well versed in the history of the Reign of Terror: he did the script for Andrzej Wajda’s Danton (1983), among numerous other ancien régime and revolutionary era film and television original scripts or adaptations. The Louvre has, therefore, chosen to align itself with a strongly ‘auteurist’ conception of the bédéiste. Without exploring how each of the contributors might see himself,20 I would like to suggest that this ‘complete artist’ commonality may in fact account for the degree to which the Louvre series reads as a set of ‘exercises in artistic thinking’, an expression Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville used to describe The Old Place, a 1999 film they made as a Museum of Modern Art (New York City) commission about arts and the museum at the ‘fall’ of the twentieth century. Clearly The Old Place is not a direct model for the bédéistes in the series, but the term’s resonance indicates the way in which these complete artists use their medium analogously to filmmakers and video artists, to explore the ambiguities and ambivalences of ‘pop culture arts’ and ‘high art’ institutions. Indeed, both filmmakers and bédéistes draw upon the museum’s cultural status as a source of their own critical reflection upon the institution itself.

Three of the albums, Le Ciel au-dessus du Louvre, Les Fântomes du Louvre and La Traversée du Louvre, feature characters (protagonists, even) who can be seen as stand-ins for the bande dessinée artist. Yslaire and Carrière’s story is centred on Jacques-Louis David’s struggle to satisfy two assignments given him by Robespierre, one a representation of the Supreme Being and one a painting of the death of the child Bara (a painting the historical David in fact never finished). David’s anguish as he struggles to represent an institution’s ideals (here, that of the French Revolutionary state) plays as a variation on the same task given to any artist who undertakes a commission – although certainly the backdrop

20 Sadly, but not especially surprisingly, the complete artists who have contributed to the series to date are all men.

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of the Reign of Terror means the late eighteenth-century painter had rather higher stakes to contend with than the twenty-first-century bédéistes who have contributed to the Louvre-Futuropolis series (Fig. 2).

While Yslaire and Carrière feature a famous historical painter, Enki Bilal’s Les Fantômes du Louvre is dedicated to the stories of the ghosts that Bilal imagines to be found behind/hidden within twenty artworks and three of the museum’s gallery locations. These phantoms are divided between the unacknowledged artists (of anonymous works or

Figure 1: Bastien’s percussive music and its effects on a statue. Eric Liberge, Aux heures impaires, 27. © Futuropolis/Musée du Louvre éditions, 2008.

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members of studios working under a more famous name), and the knowing or unknowing models of the works. The volume’s dedication to ‘resurrecting’ anonymous or minor artists, and in effect crediting the contribution of models and muses to the creative process, smacks of a prise de position in favour of those marginalized by the policing forces of institutional art history.

Each section in Les Fantômes follows the same structure: first, a black double-page spread, on the right of which is given the name of the ghost in large white letters and the name of the artwork in smaller ones; second, a white double-page spread with a brief text about the birth and era of the ghost on the left, and a nearly full-page reproduction of a Bilal canvas (Fig. 3), whose technique is explained in the preface (‘Les photos choisies, légèrement désaturées, ont été tirées sur toile. Les fantômes

Figure 2: One of the Louvre’s galleries during the Terror. Yslaire and Carrière, Le Ciel au-dessus du Louvre, 14. © Futuropolis/Musée du Louvre éditions, 2009.

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Figure 3: The ghost of Enheduana Arwi-A and the code of Hammurabi, Enheduana’s name and the caption ‘Enheduana Arwi-A naît (« tombée sur la brique de l’enfantement ») en 1776 av. J.-C., à Sippar, un jour de printemps à 12h01. Elle pèse alors 2610g et mesure 39cm.’ [‘Enheduana Arwi-A is born (“fell on the brick of childbirth”) in 1776 B.C., at Sippar, one spring day at 12:01pm. She weighed 2610g and was 29cm long.’] appear on the facing page.Enki Bilal, Les Fantômes du Louvre, 19. © Futuropolis/Musée du Louvre éditions, 2009.

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ont été révélés à l’acrylique et rehaussés au pastel’ [The chosen photos, slightly desaturated, were printed on canvas. The phantoms were revealed in acrylic and enhanced in pastel]); third, another white double-page spread with a small inset of the original photograph on the left, overlaying a full-page-plus (bleeding to the right) background image that would appear to be a preparatory blue-and-black pastel drawing for the canvas’s ghost, and on the right page, a long text narrating the life and the death of the ghost, highlighting its relationship to the artwork, and another inset, this time of another preparatory drawing of the ghost, in a sepia brown.21 Bilal thus replicates structurally the gesture of revealing the ghosts that furnishes the album’s content: the constitutive elements of his artwork (drawings and photograph) follow the complete work, complemented by the lengthy narrative. Within those narratives, the violence done to the artists or models can be seen as a reflection of their treatment by institutional art history.

David Prudhomme’s unnamed protagonist in La Traversée du Louvre is relatively easy to see as a commentary on the work of the bande dessinée artist (most critics have interpreted the protagonist as Prudhomme himself). The bédéiste wanders through the museum, chatting on his cell phone with various friends about his ideas for the album he must draw. He tells his first friend that he’s making progress on the book, and that as he walks through the museum, ‘J’ai l’impression de marcher dans une BD géante / Sur tous les murs il y a des cases’ [I have the impression of walking in a giant comic book / on every wall there are panels].22 This interpretation of the museum’s gallery spaces echoes the speculation made by one of the members of the archaeological expeditionary team in Crécy’s Période glaciaire, who theorizes that the lost society responsible for the building and artworks they discover under the glaciated ‘agglomeration’ was

non littéraire, comme vous l’avez dit Madame, mais j’irais plus loin . . . non littéraire dans le sens d’une non-alphabétisation, mais littéraire par l’image. … Un alphabet d’images … elles ont toutes un sens les unes par rapport aux autres, elles nous en apprennent autant que des archives.

[not literary, as you said, Madame, but I’d go further … not literary in the sense of alphabetically literate, but ‘imagistically literate’. … An alphabet of images … they each have meaning, each in relation to the others, they teach us as much as archives.]23

21 This would appear to be the same technique used in the original canvases currently being shown in the Arts et Métiers exhibit.

22 Prudhomme, La Traversée du Louvre, 4–5. 23 Crécy, Période glaciaire, 43.

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The character then attempts to reassemble the sequence of the paintings to tell the story of society. Each panel becomes the reproduction of an individual artwork, taking the reader on a virtual tour of the galleries in print form. Crécy here establishes a current that runs throughout the series: the bande dessinée album as faux collection catalogue or even guidebook, with complete information for each work reproduced (title, artist, date[s], medium, measurements, provenance and current gallery location).24 The volumes thus typically include complete identification of the Louvre’s artworks that they reproduce as an annex – a pedagogical, and even scholarly, gesture that sets the series’ project apart as a distinct enterprise within the world of comics production.

In La Traversée, the main character says he takes pleasure in observing the people who are looking at the art, through which practice, ‘les salles du musée deviennent de grandes histoires en volume’ [the museum’s galleries become great, three-dimensional history books].25 The exhibition practices of the art museum of course do create narratives across individual works that are in themselves relatively less narrative rich. This occurs both through explanatory plaques, but also the relations implied between paintings, sculptures, etc., themselves, by way of their proximity and arrangements in gallery space. These practices are played upon in the examples from Période glacière and Les Sous-sols du Révolu mentioned above and below, respectively. As for Prudhomme, he presents his book as a double mise en abyme: first, the paintings on the wall are suggested to be like panels; second, the museum’s visitors are, through their likeness to the subjects of those painting-panels, suggested as subjects for Prudhomme’s own panels. These resemblances – a slightly portly, strutting man echoes the lines of a smugly smiling Egyptian sarcophagus, while the contortions of a photographer make him seem to dance with a statue, for example – furnish a good deal of the visual humour of the volume, something like the observation of how purebred dogs and their owners often bear an uncanny resemblance to each other (Fig. 4).26 These insights into museum-going behaviour also reveal the very oddness of the quotidian:

24 La Traversée actually also includes a five-page annex section entitled ‘Une autre traversée du Louvre’ [Another Traverse of the Louvre] that includes statistical details about the building, the works, the visitors, the employees and ‘[q]uelques données supplémentaires’ [a few other bits of data] about publications, film shoots and the lost and found. Thus, Prudhomme’s gesture is not only academic/scholarly, but a quirky look at the quotidian. It is the most developed set of end matter in the series.

25 Prudhomme, La Traversée du Louvre, 8. 26 Pages 33–50 are especially rich in examples of this doubling of behaviours, shapes and

gestures.

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Figure 4: Museum visitors’ shapes and poses reflect those of the artworks. David Prudhomme, La Traversée du Louvre, 47. © Futuropolis/Musée du Louvre éditions, 2012.

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the reader seems to be encouraged to watch out for the strangeness or beauty of these normally invisible behaviours in the exterior world – as in the album’s final pages, when the bédéiste’s traverse of the gift shop, the metro tunnels, the subway cars themselves, storefront windows and even the objects of his own apartment takes on the look of that museum/‘giant BD’, with panels on all the walls.27

Prudhomme even places the bédéiste within a painting and indeed exposes the very architectural structure of the museum space as nothing but a vast expanse of frames within frames (even before one begins to count the framed paintings hanging on the walls): on a single page, a series of panels show the bédéiste framed in a doorway as if he was a work of art himself, the bédéiste’s silhouette reflected onto a canvas, indistinguishable from the painting, the bédéiste riding a down escalator in the foreground that crisscrosses an up escalator in the mid-ground, with a circular cutout in the wall in the rear-ground further bisected by the edge of a wall in the distant background, and finally, a long hallway with a series of prominently dark black door frames separating the galleries, and busts in alcoves in the right-hand wall further emphasizing the repeated rectangular insets.

As in La Traversée, the museum’s architecture inflects the panels of Les Sous-sols du Révolu: on one often-reproduced page the outline of I. M. Pei’s pyramid is visible across the gutters of a nine-panel page as dark and light areas are separated by crisp diagonal lines.28 Here the impression of the Louvre’s architecture is made across the grid, with shading inscribing a portion of the pyramid in each panel.

If in Prudhomme’s panels the museum’s visitors migrate out of the gallery space and onto the page, in Christian Durieux’s, the main characters go from the represented gallery into a painting itself. The terminally ill politician who is the main character of Un Enchantement had planned to commit suicide on the evening of a gala celebration of his career. Instead, he meets a young woman who (the reader eventually concludes) is some sort of ghost or other supernatural manifestation somehow originating in an artwork. Her ambiguous ontological status is revealed when the girl’s face begins to appear in artworks and is further confirmed when the reader, along with the main character, notices that her upswept hair is nearly identical to that of a woman in Watteau’s Les Deux cousines [The Two Cousins].29 The mysterious girl eventually provides the politician with a more poetic departure from

27 Prudhomme, La Traversée du Louvre, 69–73. 28 Mathieu, Les Sous-sols du Révolu, 57. 29 Durieux, Un Enchantement, 58.

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life than taking poison. After the museum appears to experience an indoor snowfall, the white marks on the page come more clearly to suggest brushstrokes: the barrier between the ‘real world’ of the gallery and the world within art is dissolving.30 The girl and politician thus are able to climb into another Watteau painting, Le Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère [Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera], and ultimately disappear into its background in the album’s final panels (Fig. 5).

Araki’s Rohan au Louvre shows that paintings and comics have the same possible value – or at least the same dangerous powers. The eponymous mangaka protagonist meets a mysterious girl, Nanase

30 Ibid., 55–64.

Figure 5: The protagonists climb into a Watteau. Christian Durieux, Un enchantement, 62. © Futuropolis/Musée du Louvre éditions, 2011.

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Fujikara, who early in the story violently destroys the drawings Rohan has made of her without her permission. At the book’s end, Rohan discovers that Nanase is the ghost of a woman trapped in a painting and entombed in the Louvre’s reserves, alone in not having been moved off-site to protect from the threat of flood from the Seine’s waters. The painting is of the blackest of blacks, and it kills by channelling the malicious spirits of a person’s past, those who died violently yet are held within the person’s memory. The murders are quite graphic – two security guards, a curator and a translator who accompany the mangaka into the reserves are gruesomely drowned, ripped to shreds by bullets, smashed or sliced to pieces in non-negotiable, emphatic lines (Fig. 6). Araki thus gives readers a negative version of the power of art, but one where all representative arts have the same potential power. That artistic force shared by the figural arts of painting and manga drawing is notably directed against the museum institution, as represented by its employees.

The prize for mise en abyme, however, most certainly belongs to Marc-Antoine Mathieu. The experience of reading his Les Sous-sols du Révolu is akin to standing between two mirrors and watching one’s reflection re-reflect into infinity. The title, the name of the ‘Expert’ main character, Eudes le volumeur, and many other variants throughout the book are all anagrams of ‘Musée du Louvre’ – words never used in their original spelling order within the volume. The reader is thus treated, for example, in the opening pages to ‘Le Musée du Révolu’:

C’est ainsi qu’on le nomme couramment.Mais certains l’appellent ‘Le Voulu démesuré’. D’autres ‘l’Œuvre du Muselé’ . . . ou encore ‘Le Seul Mou du rêve’.On dit que tous ces noms sont des anagrammes du véritable nom du musée, qui aurait été oublié.

[The Muse du Révolu, that’s what it’s called nowadays.But others call it ‘U Rude Love Muse’, and others the ‘Œuvre Due Slum’, or also the ‘Loud Muse Revue’.They say that all these names are nothing but anagrams of the museum’s real name, which has been forgotten.]31

In addition, the Mona Lisa is called ‘Muse, Louve du réel’ [Muse, She-wolf of the Real].

Where in Un Enchantement there is one instance of climbing into a painting, in Sous-sols, there are ladders to paintings within paintings,

31 Mathieu, The Museum Vaults: Excerpts from the Journal of an Expert (English-language edition, translation by Joe Johnson), 6; Mathieu, Les Sous-sols du Révolu, 55 (my translation).

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Figure 6: One of the violent deaths. Hirohiko Araki, Rohan au Louvre, 41. © Futuropolis/Musée du Louvre éditions, 2010.

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which are in fact reproductions of an eighteenth-century Italian painting of an art gallery (the chapter is called ‘La Réserve du tableau’ [The Painting’s Reserve]).32 The expansiveness of this mirroring effect as the experts climb from one frame into another is emphasized by the section’s climax of a fold-out page where the painting’s titles are successively visible on small metal plates attached to the frames: Le Voleur du musée [The Thief of the Museum] and Le Musée du voleur [The Museum of the Thief ]. Again, the bande dessinée’s power (this time ludic and mimetic rather than homicidal) is shown capable of matching that of other arts.

Mathieu goes so far as to reference the series itself – in the chapter ‘Département des copies’, the first, full-paged panel contains copies of Nicolas de Crécy’s cover art for Période glaciaire (the first book in the series, while Mathieu’s is the second), with the protagonist (a genetically modified dog) in front of the museum, its roofs emerging from the snow like the sand-encased Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes. Then, in ‘Entrepôt des cadres’ [Frames Storage], besides the inevitable and obvious frames within frames, another alternative history of art is proposed, where the hanging of empty frames can itself be so beautiful that it creates the possibility for sequential, pictorial narrative, passing by Mondrian on the way (Fig. 7).

Both of these examples set up the bande dessinée as a separate art. In the first case, Crécy’s work is reproduced within the narrative and identified in Les Sous-sols du Révolu’s back matter just like other paintings in the Louvre’s collection. In the second case, the history of sequential narrative art supplants the history of art (although the keeper of the frames admits that upstairs this type of reflection is ‘totalement déconsidéré’ – a remark easily understood as pushing back against the marginalization, or burial, of comics art by the history of art writ large).33

If the frames in Les Sous-sols du Révolu are endless, the cataloguing of the museum’s basements proves to be endless as well. Again, Mathieu furnishes the nec plus ultra of a topos recurring throughout the series: the underground spaces of the Louvre’s reserves. The series’ collective interest in the underground, physical impairment and obstruction, and its interest in hidden or buried histories of individual artworks or of the building itself, stem from the same impulse: the attempt to encourage reflection about the museum-going experience itself. Let us imagine a

32 Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Galerie de vues de la Rome moderne [Gallery of Views of Modern Rome], 1759, in Mathieu, Les Sous-sols du Révolu, 32–35.

33 Mathieu, Les Sous-sols du Révolu, 48.

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baseline shared narrative of visiting the Louvre as a museum-goer, with the main variables being the amount of time one can spend or the number of visits one might make. This ‘normative’ narrative could be quite dull (a testament to David Prudhomme’s skills as a visual storyteller is that he manages to refresh this potentially trite tale in La Traversée du Louvre). Instead, the artists in this series disrupt that typical museum-going account in various ways – by giving access/visibility to spaces that are normally invisible (underground, closed for the night), or by productively restricting access by making characters ‘differently able’ (in a real sense, such as Bastien’s deafness, or in a fantastic sense, such as Rohan’s supernatural talents).

Figure 7: Mondrian and sequential art. Marc-Antoine Mathieu, Les Sous-sols du Révolu: Extraits du journal d’un expert, 48. © Futuropolis/Musée du Louvre éditions, 2006.

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In fact, I would argue that the thematic recourse to tension between sensory impairment and revelation is also self-reflexive, insofar as the bande dessinée, like all art forms (and perhaps to an even greater degree), works with certain constraints: formal, generic, etc. These constraints may serve as generative or limiting; in the case of the Louvre series, limitation proves to be extremely productive. At the level of theme and narrative, the types of disruption of and deviation from ‘typical’ museum-going experiences that I have here grouped together are, admittedly, diverse. However, I would maintain that this very eclecticism demonstrates the way in which each individual artist in his own way is working through a fundamental problem of ‘knowability’ and ‘thinkability’ that constitutes a current relationship to art and to thought about art. When art cannot be seen (because it is not physically accessible or because of the ‘spectator’s’ blindness), can it been known or thought of? Different ways of thinking and relating to arts must therefore be negotiated – thus, the possible ‘heroism’ of characters like Bastien or Rohan, whose respective deafness and erased memory permit a different (and ultimately superior) knowing of the art that they encounter.

The primary obstruction to feature in the series is the ‘normal’, functional relationship between the museum and its contemporary public: a form of ‘blindness’ that is the result of the rules of regular museum visits. The only album that features this banal everyday relationship is La Traversée du Louvre, and even here, the caricature of excessive cell phone and camera usage (not just by the protagonist but by other visitors) indicates an estrangement from and disrespect of the cultural haut lieu that is symptomatic of a certain hostility underlying the collaboration between the ninth art and the high art museum.

In the remainder of the volumes, the public is barred from galleries because they are closed for the night (Un Enchantement and Aux heures impaires), buried under a glacier (Période glaciaire) or part of a past so distant no contemporary reader could have known it (Le Ciel au-dessus du Louvre). The narratives of Rohan and Sous-sols take place almost completely underground, in parts of the museum never open to the public, and thus invisible. The series thus disrupts the relationship the general public has to the museum space and collections, de-familiarizing and (re-)constructing new narratives for those spaces, rendering visible that to which we would normally be blind. This appropriation may be interpreted as a means of asserting a dominion over the gallery space that the bande dessinée has not experienced in the real world.34 If it is a

34 See Beaty, Comics versus Art, for a cogent account of these types of encounters.

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case of comics versus the art world, the album here can win, by virtue of its control over the terms of engagement with the Louvre that takes place on its own pages.

Within the stories, characters’ impairments can be physical, psychological or intellectual. Yslaire’s David has ‘painter’s block’, Araki’s Rohan must erase his own memory in order to avoid being killed by the malevolent spirit, Liberge’s night watchman Bastien is deaf, Prudhomme’s bédéiste interprets the museum space as mute (and then enacts that muteness by putting away his cell phone and delivering many wordless pages and panels). Période glaciaire’s expedition members have laughably limited knowledge of the lost civilization they hope to discover, and the titular ‘Expert’ in Les Sous-sols du Révolu knows nothing about the museum he is to catalogue. But in all cases, these impairments eventually generate further, superior knowledge by disrupting passive or unreflective spectating. Durieux’s protagonists in Un Enchantement wilfully cover their eyes like see-no-evil monkeys, imposing a momentary blindness, in order to better apprehend a single artwork when they restore their vision.35 The education and guesswork of the expedition members and the ‘Expert’ provide a narrative motor for their respective stories. And Bastien’s deafness is the precondition for his assuming the job of special night watchman for the ‘odd hours.’

Such disruptions or impairments can also be formal – here the comics artists disable their readers, better to serve their stories. The colour palettes in all of the volumes are quite muted (Araki’s cover is bright, but the panels inside are pastel). This self-imposed constraint is consonant with ‘adult’ series and generic conventions, but also tends to support nocturnal narratives (as in Aux heures impaires and Un Enchantement), for instance, and serves as an indication that we as readers are not seeing as clearly as we might. Sepia is also used to indicate a no longer perfectly visible past, as in Le Ciel au-dessus du Louvre. The texts thus endeavour to reveal stories that would normally be invisible and remain represented as imperfectly visible to the general public.

As I have shown above, the Louvre-Futuropolis series is heavily invested in a reflexivity and mise en abyme that would suggest the promotion of a relationship of equality between art and bande dessinée and the assertion of comics’ place within the art world. Yet the two-way hostility evoked by editor Douar in the quotation from my introduction is far from overcome. The strategies of violence and estrangement enacted by the bédéistes upon the Louvre and its collections may be

35 Durieux, Un Enchantement, 14–16 and 50–52.

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interpreted as a continuation of these hostilities (as in, if the establishment art world has been reluctant to accept you, well, bury it under a glacier!). The series’ preoccupation with death can also be read as a displacement or allegory of the death of the museum. This may be a negative gesture, like the violent killing of characters, particularly museum personnel, in Période glaciaire, Le Ciel au-dessus du Louvre, and Rohan au Louvre, but it is conjoined by the more positive evocation of the spectral that is involved in the telling of ‘hidden histories’. Christian Durieux’s afterword to Un Enchantement opens, ‘Il faut aimer les fantômes pour aimer les musées’ [You have to love ghosts to love museums], while Enki Bilal’s preface opens, ‘C’est comme si au Louvre on respirait du fantôme’ [It’s as if in the Louvre you breathe ghosts].36 Les Fantômes du Louvre is dedicated to the stories of the ghosts Bilal imagines to be captured in or in some way found behind a selection of artworks. Although there is a positive creative gesture involved in these narratives, the museum is nonetheless consistently aligned with entombment. The museum, and particularly the Louvre, would in fact here seem to be the end of art, its arrest, its burial and imprisonment (hence the need for Liberge’s Bastien to free the artwork’s souls, or for Bilal to tell the stories of the ghosts). Narratives arise precisely from the tension between the arrested quality (or deadness) of the art within the museum and the momentary freedom that it attains within the bande dessinée’s re-imagining of it. The museum as a dead space thus gives rise to a vibrant artistic production outside of its walls through this publishing endeavour.

In terms of history, the series’ movement also tends towards a gloomy prognostication for the museum: the museum’s past is a frequent topic, the present less so, and the future is, well, consider the glacier! The spectator, in the form of the bande dessinée blogging reader-critics cited above, exemplifies a radically egalitarian position vis-à-vis an elitist public. But at the same time, these blogging reader-critics tend not to embrace their position in relationship to the Louvre and the bande dessinée equally. Meanwhile, the apparent gesture of integration of comics art in Louvre gallery spaces served only to prove just how ill-suited the institution was to apprehending comics art on its own terms, no matter how successful their series had been as a publishing venture. The resistance embedded in the series’ generally positive critical reception suggests that this endeavour may not really be making the Louvre more relevant to new/younger audiences (which could, of

36 Ibid., 66; Bilal, Les Fantômes du Louvre, preface.

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course, change as the list of contributors expands). However, as a publishing success, the series may be making the bande dessinée relevant to people with a mainstream or elitist interest in the Louvre – which is not necessarily bad news either, as this may encourage a more flexible relationship to thinking about art in the new century.

Margaret C. Flinn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of French and Italian and the Program in Film Studies at the Ohio State University. Her articles on cinema and new media art have appeared in journals such as SubStance, Studies in French Cinema, Contemporary French & Francophone Studies: Sites, and Yale French Studies. She is also the author of a book entitled The Social Architecture of French Cinema, 1929–39, forthcoming from Liverpool University Press in 2014.

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