Auction The universe of the creator of Tintin: the cover of Hergé's "Blue Lotus" at auction.

The Artcurial house on the Champs-Elysees in Paris is auctioning Thursday the brilliant design created by Herge in 1936 for the cover of the Blue Lotus, estimated between 2.2 and 2.8 million euros -

Lionel Urman / SIPA

A record for Tintin.

A drawing by Hergé for the cover of

Tintin's

album

The Blue Lotus 

on Thursday broke the world auction record for comics, with 3.175 million euros including costs, Artcurial announced on Thursday.

The 

Blue Lotus

 is one of the masterpieces of the Belgian designer.

The album marks a turning point in his creation.

It is that of “his narrative and political maturity, for which he documents himself as a true journalist,” notes Artcurial.

The boards appeared in 1934-35 in the review

Le Petit Vingtième

, before the album was published in 1936.

A mystery surrounds this work

Georges Rémi alias Hergé fell in love with China after meeting a young graduate of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, Tchang Tchong-Jen, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship.

The reproduction of this drawing was too expensive, it will not be chosen to become the cover of the album.

A simplified version is adopted, with a black dragon on a red background and much less detail.

A mystery surrounds this work, auctioned at an online sale because of the epidemic: was it really offered by Hergé to the son of its publisher Louis Casterman, Jean-Paul, then aged seven , as the heirs of the publisher claim?

A legend ?

The child would have folded it in six and kept it in a drawer, from which the sheet of paper would have been pulled out decades later.

Experts question the veracity of this story, as does Hergé's claimant: Briton Nick Rodwell.

Husband of Fanny, second wife of Hergé and universal legatee, the latter provides careful protection of the work of Hergé, whose albums have sold a total of 250 million copies.

For Philippe Goddin, one of the best connoisseurs of the work, “by selling the drawing, the Castermans are not guilty of anything.

They believed in the legend passed down to them by their father ”.

But he considers "eminently suspect" the story of Jean-Paul Casterman (died in 2009) when he claimed to have received this drawing as a gift.

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