BIBLIOTHÈQUE  PUBLIQUE D’INFORMATION-  CENTRE POMPIDOU

Free admission subject to availability of seats

BPI, level 2

29 May – 4 November. 2024

12pm – 10pm, every mondays, wednesdays, thursdays, fridays

10am – 10pm, every saturdays, sundays

UNE VIE ROMANESQUE, THE EXHIBITION

In the exhibition ‘Corto Maltese, Une vie romanesque’ set up in the Bibliothéque, the leitmotif for the visitor will be Corto’s literary references, more than 120 original drawings and illustrations in addition to reproductions, period magazines and books taken directly from Hugo Pratt’s legendary library.

A journey divided into three parts, developed by Beaubourg in close collaboration with co-curator Patrizia Zanotti and the Cong SA team. The itinerary is preceded by the imaginary biography of Corto Maltese, to allow the visitor to enter this real and imagined world, full of literary and historical references and of missed and unmissed appointments with characters who have marked the history of the 20th century. Corto’s life thus becomes a fil rouge among the works to interpret the quotations and encounters, each following his own sensitivity, as Hugo Pratt always wanted: “I tell the truth as if it were a lie. Unlike many others who tell lies trying to pass them off as true, in this way the reading becomes double, triple, and the reader finds that certain things I said were true, then he gets a great desire to go in search of them“.

In the first part, La construction du personnage is dedicated to the editorial history of Corto Maltese, from its beginnings in Genoa to its success in France, with the original books of some of the magazines where the stories were published for the first time. The second section A récit traversé par les références littéraires transports us among images and words through which Pratt transformed the dreams born from his youthful readings into adventures full of meanings, looking for Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Conrad’s The Shadow Line and the Melville’s mysteries of the depths of the mind and the sea. We will find Jack London, Rimbaud, Kipling and Coleridge, Shakespeare and Borges. The last space is dedicated to Corto Maltese entre réel et fiction, where we will find many of the characters created by Hugo Pratt, to make fiction the dream closest to reality.

There is no Corto story set in Paris, yet without Paris perhaps there would be no Corto stories. We know that “A Ballad of the Salty Sea” came out in 1967 in the Sgt. Kirk magazine of Ivaldi, a visionary entrepreneur who wanted to pay homage to Pratt’s genius with an editorial line dedicated to his works. Unfortunately, that experiment did not last long and Hugo had to find a new place to let his imagination soar, he needed an idea: “When Sgt. Kirk closed a few weeks later, I thought back to that offer and, at the beginning of 1970, I took a train from Genoa to Paris and introduced myself to Pif without any warning. It was on the train that I got the idea of taking Corto Maltese, who, in A Ballad of the Salty Sea, was but one of many characters, and making him the hero of a whole series of episodes.”

PRATT, PARIS AND A LABYRINTH

Culture Minister Jack Langvi asks you to do him the honor of attending the inauguration of the “Hugo Pratt” exhibition as part of the “Venice in Paris” event, Friday 14 March, at the National Galleries of the Grand Palais.

It was 1986, 38 years ago. Yet that was a very important date for world culture, the comic strip was admitted to a museum as prestigious as the Parisian Grand Palais and probably for the first time Pratt’s long and stubborn battle had been won: drawn literature had been formally recognised and consecrated. Those works also returned to the Ville Lumière in 2011, on the occasion of the exhibition “Le voyage imaginaire d’Hugo Pratt” at the Pinacothèque, and the following year the Museum of Freemasonry Headquarters of the Grand Orient of France hosted an exhibition with the evocative title “Corto Maltese et les secrets de l’initiation, Imaginaires et Franc-Maçonnerie à Venise autour d’Hugo Pratt“.

Paris and Pratt is an important tale in the collection of stories that was the adventurous life of the author, who lived here for a good 14 years, a period longer than the Argentine phase. In ‘The Desire to be Useless’, Pratt recounts that journey as follows:

Thinking back on those Parisian years, France appears to me like a labyrinth: a labyrinth of love, like the one Eleanor of Aquitaine had on Île-aux-Vaches, today Île Saint-Louis, where I later ended up living, is also a labyrinth where I used to get lost. France was an attempt for me to organise the Hypothesis.