Gerard Dorville

As well as Nicolas Rolin’s magnificent hospital for the poor, with its Rogier van der Weyden Last Judgment, Beaune also tempts the eager sightseer with its own small museum.

I love small museums. They usually contain something interesting, an object that gives you a glimpse into a bit of history or a way of life that you didn't know about, or a display that introduces you to a talent you would never have heard of otherwise.

In the Beaune museum when we were there, they had an exhibition of the work of a cartoonist called Gerard Dorville, who lived between 1933 and 1976 and, as the museum put it, "created, with much humour and irony, cartoon strips showing people typical of French post-war society in amusing and comical situations of everyday life."

Dorville's work was published in magazines such as Record, Vaillant and Pilote. This blogger claims that he is pretty much forgotten now, which may be partly explained, I suppose, by the fact that his life was shorter than most.

In the poster here, it seems to me that Dorville shows similarities in his style to Ronald Searle (I have an idea that this could be set against some of Searle's drawings of schoolmasters)

Dorville's series depicting the various types of French person who can be described as "con" did not really enlighten me further on exactly how that strange term could be translated into English, but it did help me understand its meaning better, even if I am no closer to articulating it in my own native tongue:

Dorville seems to have created many characters for his cartoon strips but the one that won my heart was a man called Arsène. He appears to spend most of his life as a cleaner. 

In this strip, he notices that all the clerks where he works are going into the director's office, offering him bunches of lily of the valley. He wracks his brain and realises it is the 1st of May, which, I presume is a day when people do this in France. He is worried because he ought to be following suit but as he says he doesn't have the same resources as all the suits. Finally, he resolves his problem and in the last frame we see Arsène burst into the director's office clutching a bunch of lily of the valley, which he offers to his boss. "But it's the 15th", his boss cries. "I know, and I'm sorry", replies Arsène, "my financial means are extremely limited and so I had to wait until the price of lily of the valley had dropped." 

I love Arsène's optimistic innocence, his tousled hair, I love the simple line with which so much personality is created; how can someone so endearing be conjured out of so little?

In the next sequence of pictures, Arsène is given the job of clearing out all the office's old newspapers. "They collect these tons and tons of old paper and apparently it's my fault" he mutters to himself, opening the cupboard he is supposed to be emptying. The entire contents fall out on top of him. "Look at all these old yellowing papers", he mutters, and then he picks up one and begins to read. "How gripping", he exclaims, "strikes, barricades, protests!" And then it comes to him - he's missed the lot, (the paper, from May, is, presumably from 1968, perhaps some years before). "When I think," he cries, "that I did nothing, with my usual lateness". Somehow again, this simple tale is made charming and amusing by the artist's brilliant characterisation through line. Dear, silly Arsène, a dreamer, rather than a player:

Far too late, he decides to set up his own protest, occupying the director's office, with a sign attached to his broom handle reading "Power to Arsène" and a stream of claims about contesting authority and going on strike. 

In the next strip, we see an unknown citizen trying to make a telephone call from a public telephone box to a Monsieur Goscinny (he of Asterix fame perhaps?) He has absolutely no success, and reflects on the better conditions given to astronauts - air conditioning, food and drink, the possibility of sitting down and stretching their legs - in their equally cramped cabins. A crowd gathers as our unknown hero continues to try, without success, to put his call through, and eventually a gendarme arrives. The failed caller exits the booth, exclaiming about how scandalous it is that a heroic citizen who has the courage to spend three hours in a telephone box is treated with such lack of respect while, when astronauts emerge from their confined surroundings,  they are acclaimed by the entire world:

t

While the exhibition gave really very few details of the life of Dorville, my life was improved by being introduced to his cheerful affectionate drawings, and I was left wondering if it is a particularly Francophone talent, this creation of little worlds of drawn personalities (Tintin, of course, comes to mind, first and foremost, but also Sempé and the above mentioned Goscinny)

This is the last picture I took in the exhibition. Here are the captions, roughly translated to English:

Along the top: "If, when looking at these images you say to yourself, "how is it possible that a magazine like Pilot which is supposed to be at the avant garde of humour and is always looking out for new graphic directions, allows itself, presumably for low reasons to do with publicity, to publish this hackneyed gag that nobody could possibly want?"

Down the side: Well the reason we did so is quite simple - this scene (which proves once and for all the quality of our magazine) unfolded under the gaze of one of our number, on the 6th May, on a pavement in Jussieu street in the 5th arrondismenet of Paris. If this female reader recognises herself in the picture we would ask her to introduce herself to the editorial team who would like to congratulate her  on the obvious interest she takes in Pilot, while advising her to enjoy the magazine at home in future, so as to avoid further such incidents.