Hergé considered himself as the exclusive owner of the universe of his heroes. When his assistants rightly worrying about his health tried to organize a continuation of his work, he resisted fiercely, stating in an interview quoted by Wikipedia : "To live Tintin, to live Haddock, Tournesol, the Dupondt, all the others, I believe that I am the only one who can do it : Tintin is me, exactly as Flaubert said : Madame Bovary, it's me !" No one will know what sort of end he had planned for his story Tintin et l'Alph-Art stopped by his death.
During his last years Hergé accepted with complacency the cultural solicitations. He prepared in 1979 a fresco for the new Centre Culturel de Wallonie-Bruxelles in Paris. A draft drawing 34 x 72 cm lining more than thirty characters was sold for HK $ 8.1M including premium by Artcurial on October 3, 2016.
In 1982 Hergé worked on a project of fresco for the two walls along the platforms of the future Stockel metro station in Brussels. For these two murals 135 m long each, he made sketches on the scale of about 1/100. After the death of the author in 1983 these drawings were used as models for the final art.
Retained by a member of the team and totally unknown until now, this pair of sketches 85 and 95 cm long and 3.5 cm high will be sold by Librairie Lhomme in Liège on October 21, lot 22 here shared on the DrouotLive bidding platform.
Hergé had demonstrated for that last time all his verve in these dynamic drawings which gather overall about 140 of his characters in funny attitudes copied from the albums. The price of this ultimate work in a format that was unique in Hergé's art is impossible to anticipate.
SOLD for € 110K before fees