Throughout the week – Monday, 29-July-2024, through Saturday, 03-Aug-2024
In my earlier post about the Brussels Comic Book Museum, I mentioned that Brussels is a city of comics. Art, murals, paintings, all of it adorns the streets… making for an absolutely amazing environment to walk around and explore.
Interestingly enough, I walked around and explored that amazing environment quite extensively. I found it absolutely glorious; and I hope that you, my dear readers, will as well.
Without further ado… may I present my favorites of… Brussels street art:
All across the city there’s murals large and small, on building corners and alleyways and walls and blank spaces. Many are homages to various famous Belgian comic strips, most that I don’t recognize, but all of which I appreciate for the warmth and color that they bring to the city.
There’s even a whole museum dedicated to them – one that, of course, I made a major point to include in my adventures!
While it was under construction, the fun of the museum wasn’t dimmed in the slightest – It was quite warm, I’ll admit, but I powered through the sweltering heat to appreciate the view into the European side of comics.
It was really neat – definitely a very different view of comics than I’d seen before. Focused on more older comics, with literally nothing pertaining to super heroes or even a veiled reference to “golden age” or “silver age” from the United States. This museum, unsurprisingly, focused on Belgian comics – but also discussed the various genres and overarching ideas of comics.
It was definitely interesting, but I feel that it lost out on quite a bit of important context by ignoring the world as a whole, in favor of one small subset. Art is always influenced by itself, and I’d have loved to learn how European comics were influenced by American artists, and vice versa… I still enjoyed it, though, and left with more knowledge in my mind (and quite a few more questions that I enjoyed learning about on my own!).
Driving to museums is cool and all, but you know what’s even cooler? Walking approximately 120m (just under 400ft) to an art museum! A combination Art / History museum!
Not art history, that is to say. But a museum that showcases both art and history. Cassis is a small town, okay? The town museum isn’t super extensive, just roll with it.
And… I’ll be frank, here, the museum is clearly underfunded. I’m not saying that I could do better, but… as far as town museums go, this one didn’t quite reach the benchmark of “this museum showcases at least the summary of the town’s wikipedia page”.
It was neat, though, don’t get me wrong! Just… left me wanting, in terms of actual content.
What was there, then? Well – It was two stories; the first one being some interesting artifacts that had been recovered from the Mediterranean surrounding Cassis, and the second being paintings by Jacques Troupel. The artifacts were mainly Amphorae, the types of large stoneware jugs that were used in Greek and Roman times. The paintings were mainly “fire paintings”, where Jacques would paint with flammable material, and then light it to produce the interesting flame-scoring patterns.
It was neat, definitely… but I’ll still add a quick link to Wikipedia for those of my readers interested in the more detailed history of the town.
