Corto Maltese, the world in adventure

After the world of Hergé, Jules Verne and Folon, in 2025 the Saline Royale wanted to pay tribute to a new icon of art and comics: Corto Maltese, the famous double of his august creator Hugo Pratt.

Hugo Pratt
Hugo Pratt (1927-1995) is unanimously considered to be one of the world's greatest cartoonists. His comic strips, graphic works and watercolours are exhibited in the greatest museums, from the Grand Palais to the Pinacothèque in Paris, not to mention the Vittoriano in Rome, Ca' Pesaro in Venice and Santa Maria della Scala in Siena. He himself defined his stories as "drawn literature". He has been quoted by authors and artists such as Tim Burton, Frank Miller, Woody Allen, Umberto Eco and Paolo Conte. He has lived in Italy, Argentina, England, France and Switzerland. An avid traveller, he has crossed practically the whole of the rest of the world.

Corto Maltese
Despite an abundant and protean output, Hugo Pratt will remain essentially the author of Corto Maltese, the romantic, modest and pragmatic sailor who travels the world in 1904-1925. While bringing in historical figures (such as Jack London, Enver Pasha, Butch Cassidy, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Stalin and Hermann Hesse), Hugo Pratt gave Corto Maltese such powerful creations that fiction and reality became indissolubly linked.

Hugo Pratt has created a unique body of work, which is all the more unclassifiable for the fact that, like that of any true artist, it has evolved considerably over time, whether through his bold graphics (the interplay between abstract and figurative boxes), his scenarios, which bring together all types of culture, or his brilliant dialogue, which he intersperses with silences that are paradoxically full of meaning. In Corto Maltese, the drawing, initially derived from the technique of contrasting black and white, became increasingly schematic, to the point of appearing as a form of writing ("I draw my writing and I write my drawings", Hugo Pratt said at the time).

Hugo Pratt's adventurous youth and his intimate understanding of various civilisations have, of course, provided material for certain stories. But for Hugo Pratt, life experience went hand in hand with book knowledge. He made no distinction between books and life, and his comic strips were almost always inspired by what he had read, usually about a subject he had discovered as a child. To a large extent, it could be said that Hugo Pratt spent his adult life building on the reading he had done in his youth. He was a "literary traveller", going on pilgrimages to the places of his inner world, in search of Homer in Greece, Yeats in Ireland, Zane Grey in the United States or Stevenson in the Samoan Islands.

In the Corto Maltese series, Hugo Pratt demonstrated all his talents as a storyteller and his art of storytelling and drawing, contributing to the success of the graphic novel created "by a cartoonist who writes and a writer who draws".

The exhibition at the Royal Saltworks will explore the world of adventure and literary and historical references of the dark sailor with the earring through original plates, watercolours, drawings and loans from the ethnological collections of the Musée des Confluences in Lyon.