The breadth of the talent of the creator of Corto Maltese can be discovered in a vast retrospective exhibition of works at La Pinacothèque de Paris.

A spring morning in Paris, starting with un croissant et un petit café on Place de la Madeleine helps you to distinguish between what’s hitting your face: the light warm sun or the cool fresh drizzle. Not mysterious then how one can easily drift back in time on entering La Pinacothèque de Paris at number 28 and take an exhilarating ride back to the 20th century’s colonial world meeting sailors and soldiers, exotic women and cut-throat adventurers. After a heady tour of large and small colourful canvases, sketch books, posters and comic strips, it was still not easy to ascertain who was at the driving seat.

Corto Maltese was born on July 10, 1887 in Valletta. His father was a British sailor from Cornualles while his mother was a gypsy, born in Seville. He took up residence in Antigua but preferred to live in Hong Kong. He spent a good part of his childhood in Cordoba but his adventures were to take him to the four corners of the earth. To honour him the Maltese erected a monument in Valletta.

Hugo Pratt was born on June 15, 1927 in Rimini to Rolando Pratt and Evelina Genero. He grew up in Venice. His paternal grandfather was of English origin while on his mother’s side he had Turks and Jews. He was also related to the actor Boris Karloff, whose real name was William Henry Pratt. In 1937, Hugo Pratt moved with his mother to Abyssinia, joining his soldier father with Mussolini’s conquering army of Ethiopia. Pratt’s father was captured in 1941 by British troops and in late 1942, died from disease as a prisoner of war. The same year, Hugo and his mother were interned in a prison camp where he would buy comics from guards. After the war he lived in Argentina, London, Paris, Italy, Switzerland and Brussels.

Not easy to separate fact from fiction.

Only a few years before his death in 1995, Hugo Pratt was asked why he named his hero Corto Maltese. His answer, now echoing at this sumptuous exhibition hall was simple. Corto in Spanish, he said, means “curt”; Maltese became famous for the 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett which was also made into a John Huston Hollywood film starring Humphrey Bogart.

It is only natural that Pratt was inspired by a novel when choosing his hero’s name. Most of his stories in fact were inspired by the literature he read from different cultures: Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, to whom he dedicated a significant album towards the end of his life called Le Dernier Vol.

Le voyage imaginaire d’Hugo Pratt gives homage to a great artist of the bandes dessinées which have often adorned museum halls the world over, even though some traditionalists still look down upon comics as an inferior branch of art. For this milestone exhibition in Paris, Patrizia Zanotti and Patrick Amsellem, commissioners of the exhibition, invited 35 collectors from around the world to lend 160 works featuring six illustrative sections showing exotic islands and oceans, ethereal Amazon Indians, the military in uniform, fatal women of desire, deserts and an array of cities.

www.hugopratt.com

• Le voyage imaginaire d’Hugo Pratt runs at La Pinacothèque de Paris from 10.30 a.m. to 7.30 p.m. daily until August 21.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.