An Enchantment

February 4, 2013
When the world’s great art museum, the Louvre, wants to commission a series of graphic novels based around its holdings and the museum itself, a top-notch group of artists responded. The result has been a notable series of graphic novels by such talents as Marc-Antoine Mathieu and Nicolas de Crécy. This latest entry in ComicsLit’s Louvre editions comes from Belgian artist Durieux, who imagines the director of the museum as a faded grey bureaucrat on the verge of retirement, who is swept away into the building’s nighttime vastness by a mysterious and pixieish muse. As they playfully romp beneath the ancient works of art, dashing about with bottles of wine and hiding from the security guards like teenagers, the aged and cynical director muses on literature and politics. Durieux’s fantasia peeps occasionally at these darker things: the legacy of dictatorship and history’s evils contained in the Louvre’s hallways and priceless works of art. This brooding subtext, however, is overridden by the artist’s sweet sense of mystery and magic, which has produced a beautiful lark of a story.

July 1, 2013

Gr 9 Up-At an evening celebration at the Louvre in honor of his retirement, an old man sneaks away from the spectacle and security to reminisce about his time as a clerk in the building, surrounded by the art. He encounters a mysterious young woman who tries to teach him how to see the exhibits in a new way and perhaps enable him to experience a deeper mystery. Primarily told in lustrous sepia browns reminiscent of archives and age, this is a whimsical story with an undercurrent of sincere redemption. The panels and pacing give the narrative lots of space, letting readers feel the vastness of the empty museum rooms and, by extension, the majesty of the reproduced paintings and the intimacy of being able to encounter them in this rare way. Both characters are sketches, almost ciphers, standing in for a standard type of aged bureaucrat and the pixie dream girl trope, but that's because the story is really an excuse to provide the rarified Louvre experience. The book was originally produced as one of a short series of Louvre-sponsored bandes dessinee, which is presumably what allows for the excellent and faithful re-creations of so many paintings (including blousy post-Renaissance nudes), as well as reproductions of the architecture. Evocative and touching, this is an enjoyable fable about what is, or should be, truly important.-Benjamin Russell, Belmont High School, NH

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2013
The fifth graphic novel copublished by Paris' great art museum continues the large format of The Sky over the Louvre (2011) and Rohan at the Louvre (2012). In terms of plot and development, it's the most minimal in the series, a charmer akin to such films as Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating, Eric Rohmer's Rendezvous in Paris, and those of Durieux's acknowledged master, Jean Cocteau. The story couldn't be simpler. The retiring director of the Louvre sneaks away from his opulent retirement party and encounters a lithe and pretty young woman sitting on the floor of a darkened gallery. The two then prowl the museum, evading guards and reacting to artworks until they fancifullyindeed, fantasticallyleave together. Durieux veils every panel with crepuscular sepia, which dulls the colors and contours of the featured paintings and installations but warmly enfolds the protagonists' developing relationship. His drawing style is otherwise pure European comics realism, eschewing caricature and approaching the photographic, with, throughout, hints of the amusing, quicksilver line of . . . Cocteau.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)