What is Rohan at the Louvre?
In 2009 the Louvre Museum in Paris exhibited its Bande Dessinee project, inviting leading comics artists to create works engaging with the museum, and Hirohiko Araki was among them, the JoJo creator chosen from Japan. His contribution grew into Rohan au Louvre, a full length, full color story published first in connection with the project and then as a book in Japan in 2011, with an English edition from NBM Publishing.
The story sends Kishibe Rohan to Paris after a painting: a work by a fictional Japanese artist, executed in a black pigment of impossible darkness and cursed reputation, supposedly stored in the Louvre's depths. It is a Rohan story in the classic mold, research as adventure, but drawn and painted entirely in color, with the museum itself, its galleries and its city, rendered as lovingly as any Stand battle.
The book's importance is institutional as much as artistic. A manga artist producing a new work for the Louvre, displayed in the museum and sold as a large format art book in multiple languages, marked a stage in manga's acceptance by the fine art world that the exhibitions entry in this hub continues. Araki, the Sendai schoolboy raised on his father's art books, had been collected by the most famous museum on earth.
As an object it is also one of the most satisfying Araki collectibles: oversized, full color throughout, available in European, Japanese and English editions with different bindings, and short enough to read in one sitting. The Library recommends it, with Baoh, as the non JoJo Araki book to own first.
