Brussels

The walls of this Belgian city are covered with cartoon characters. It's a great way to get the kids to appreciate art!

The independent, by John Walsh Sunday, 18th March 2007

You can lead a child to art but you'll have a terrible time trying to make him go inside. Not all the blandishments of a modern art gallery - shops, café and interactive displays that mean you don't even have to look at the damn pictures - will work if you have a pair of philistines like mine. Certainly not when you're in Brussels, which as far as those two are concerned is all about chocolate shops. So while my wife popped into the "Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts" for Bosch and Brueghel, I frogmarched our barbarians back to the hotel past that obnoxious little Manneken Pis.

We were just turning into Rue de l'Etuve when I spotted something odd on the exposed gable end of a house. It was two men and a dog coming down a fire escape . "That's Tintin!" said John. And, indeed, it was. A life-sized Tintin, Captain Haddock and Snowy, all making their way down a two-dimensional fire escape that had been painted on to the side of the house.

Across the road there was another huge mural. Down the side of a café someone had painted an aerial view of the road we were standing in. In the background of the mural we could see the very building we were looking at now. It, too, had a mural painted on the wall above the cafe. For a moment I almost expected to see us standing in the cartoon staring up at the cartoon.

Fortunately our hotel was nearby and the helpful concierge had a leaflet that explained what was going on. Since 1991 the burghers of Brussels have been celebrating the fact that their city is the European capital of the "ninth art" via a series of murals on the gable ends of buildings.

Belgium creates a huge amount of "bandes dessinées". The Tintin fire escape mural we'd seen had been painted in 2004 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Belgium's most famous two-dimensional son.
Looking through the Cartoon Trail brochure we soon found that there are more than 30 of these huge cartoon images round the city, including "Le Chat", created by Philippe Geluck in 1982, this stout besuited feline emanates a bizarre cross-eyed "savoir faire". You either find him funny or you don't. We found him on the end of a house, not far from the "Gare du Midi". We also found "Cubitus" in "Rue de Flandre". Cubitus is a big jovial white dog. In this mural he has taken the place of Manneken Pis and is urinating away merrily with a big dopey smile on his face.

By this time we'd spent so long browsing that I felt we should all buy something. I was rather taken with a series of 6 inches high topless Belgian nuns' figurines; very tasteful but somehow I couldn't see myself convincing my wife they were art...

Blandishments: flatterie
Philistines: (ici) personne qui n'apprécie pas l'art
To frogmarch: amener de force
Obnoxious: odieux
Gable end: pignon (partie supérieure triangulaire du mur d'un bâtiment)
Fire escape: escalier de secours
Aerial view: vue aérienne
Leaflet: dépliant
Burghers: bourgeois
Ninth art: neuvième art = Bande Dessinée

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Les questions servent d'orientation dans votre commentaire. Vous n'êtes pas contraints d'y répondre.

- Present what type of text this is, its date and author.
- Sum up the text in your own words.
- In your opinion, how can children be introduced to art?
- How far can art go? From your point of view, can art be taken to the streets and made accessible to all, or should it stay "in the museum"?
- What do you think of mural paintings in the city, whether wild graffiti-art or, as quoted in the text, a sort of live size cartoon exhibition?