History

The study, it seems, evolved during the Renaissance from a piece of bedroom furniture: the writing desk, escritoire, or secretary, in which a man traditionally kept his ledgers and family documents, usually under lock and key. Personal privacy as we think of it scarcely existed prior to the Renaissance, which is when the wide-open house was first subdivided into specific rooms dedicated to specific purposes; before that time, the locked writing desk was as close to a private space as the house afforded the individual. But as the cultural and political currents of the Renaissance nourished the new humanist conception of self as a distinct individual, there emerged a new desire (at least on the part of those who could afford it) for a place one might go to cultivate this self—for a room of one’s own. The man acquired his study, and the woman her boudoir.

Probably the first genuinely private space in the West, the Renaissance study was a small locked compartment that adjoined the master bedroom, a place where no other soul set foot and where the man of the house withdrew to consult his books and papers, manage the household accounts, and write in his diary.

The team's cartooning technique – partly inherited but soon individualised – was an animated, breezy, ultra-modern one. Eventually, it became known as 'le style atome'. This moniker derived from the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, whose signature was a sculpture called 'the Atomium'. An outsized icon of Populuxe design, this seemed to match the sparky visual spirit of post-War Spirou. Certainly it paralleled the artists' angular shapes, their streamlined drawings and a use of bright, sharp colours. Graphically much brasher than Hergé's ligne claire, le style atome gave a nod to '50s and '60s US culture. It featured rounder speech bubbles instead of rectangles and privileged short, spunky dialogue over declamations.

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Spirou's energetic art is now known as "the Marcinelle school" or "the school of Charleroi". Both terms refer to the site of the Dupuis' printing firm. But those artists who worked with Jijé had a different name for it. They called the work gros nez – or "big nose" – comedy.

The flipside of Marcinelle art was found in the pages of Tintin. A vehicle for Hergé's hero, this weekly was the laboratory of a rival "Brussels' school". Just as Marcinelle art reflected Jijé’s temperament, the Tintin employees operated in Hergé's shadow. Their highly polished work was required to resemble his and, in their atelier, an artist wore his suit and tie. He would labour to produce pristine pages, with refined lines underscored by un-shaded colour.