Franco-Belgian Visionary Art : Selections from the Alain Van Passen Comics Collection

Our talk zooms in on the curatorial selection process for an exhibition and catalogue based on the Alain Van Passen collection at Ghent University. Focusing on comics magazines published between 1935 and 1965, the exhibition unveils a lost world of French and Belgian comics and their translations and reworkings of American, British and Italian imports. Van Passsen's pristine collection, built over decades of searching and exchanging, offers us unprecedented insight into the diverse trajectories of twentieth century popular publishing. These images also shed light on changing popular tastes in comics and visual culture, which mutate in their visual styles and influences and in their generic preferences.Scattered across the millions of panels and magazine pages collected by Van Passen, there is a long-forgotten history of vibrant, surrealist even ‘visionary’ images. Our talk shows how approaching this multitude of images through thematic selections by a team of colleagues offers an effective means of managing the sheer scope of material and constructing a possible counter history of comics.