The Musée Maillol in the seventh arrondissement of Paris advertises with the curved facade of a baroque city palace. The exhibition area itself is accessed through the narrow tube of a modern extension, and its foyer is filled by the museum shop. It is currently all about Asterix. At first glance, this is not exactly what one would expect given the predilection of the sculptor Aristide Maillol, who died in 1944, for female nudes in this house. And if you go up a narrow spiral staircase to the special exhibition area, at the top of the stairs you come across a life-size bronze nude crouched down in an approximate thinking pose of the great rival Rodin, behind which a lively parade of black and white cartoon characters takes place on the walls,all of which have no eyes for the unclothed, patinated green.

Andreas Platthaus

Editor in charge of literature and literary life.

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    You can hardly talk about Maillol's measurements with the dwarf Asterix or his obese buddy Obelix (“No, I'm not fat!”). But it's not about Aristide Maillol, it's about Albert Uderzo, the draftsman of a whole phalanx of comic series, which today are all overshadowed by his world success “Asterix”. Uderzo died last March shortly before his ninety-third birthday, and for the retrospective of his work at the Musée Maillol, his widow and daughter published the works that the draftsman himself had kept in the studio. So you could call it a documentation of Uderzo's favorite sites. Another major lender is the Bibliothèque Nationale,which a few years ago Uderzo and the heirs of his longtime scenarioist René Goscinny had been generously gifted with "Asterix" original pages. There is probably no other comic figure who embodies the French self-image as much as the little Gallic warrior. A major Uderzo exhibition should be a national act.

    The museum is looking for a new audience with Asterix

    The show in the Musée Maillol is big, but it is in the wrong place in the private museum, which has had an eventful operating history since it opened in 1995.

    Less because of the missing Maillol relationship of Uderzo's drawings - he had drawn a few ideal figures in the spirit of American superheroes in the 1940s - than because of the rooms, which are disillusioning profanity and stand in the way of creative exhibition dramaturgy.

    But it may also be that the strong involvement of the von Uderzo family prevented any creative treatment of the work of the noble dead.

    For the Musée Maillol, after a long period of pandemic-related closure, it is the start of a reorientation towards the popular, now that the family of Maillol's last muse, the later gallery owner Dina Vierny, who stocked the house with her collection, is again in command. It couldn't be more popular than Uderzo, of course, and with more than 250 objects you squeezed into the mostly tiny rooms whatever was possible - almost a miracle that a character name like Franz Katzenblummerswihundwagenplaftembomm, which the witty-malicious Goscinny used in 1967 for the common The Indian series "Umpah-Pah" came up with the idea to bring the friend Uderzo to the limits of his speech bubbles, which also fits on the wall.