Asterix and the squid vase: vibrant octopus art from 1,300 years BC

Good Asterix comics are full of asides and references, and in the new album The White Iris is a striking visual aside. When Bellefleur, wife of the village chief, is lured by the villain Viceversus to Lutetia (Paris), the capital of Gaul, she visits a museum, Kebranlix (reference to the Musée le quai Branly). They walk while talking past a beautiful Greek vase, actually a mixing vessel, a so-called ‘crater’, for mixing water and wine. It features a beautifully stylized octopus, which spreads its tentacles gracefully over the vase with a surprised look. Artist Didier Conrad has placed the octopus vase, which plays no further role in the story, emphatically in the foreground. As if he wants to say: look what a beautiful squid design, enjoy with me.

By chance I came across a picture of the original Greek vase on which Didier based his drawing. It is an octopus crater, 41 cm high, out the British Museum, dating to around 1,300 BC, found in Rhodes. With its mobile tentacles, the octopus vase fits into the ceramic tradition of Crete, where the Minoan civilization flourished centuries earlier. Their vibrant art was adopted and stylized by the Greeks. In 2019, the octopus crater that Didier drew was exhibited in the British Museum.

Cartoonish style

In the rest of the Kebranlix museum in the Asterix album, existing works of art (and snobbish art connoisseurs) are made fun of: for example, there is a white marble variant of the famous white square on white ground painting by Malevich – Malevix in Asterix. But the octopus vase is not a parody. That is not necessary, because the octopus has cheerful cartoon-like eyes – also on the original vase. Many of the decorations, especially on Minoan ceramics, are painted very loosely and vividly, almost cartoonish. Ceramics, pottery making, was high art in Crete in the second millennium BC, wrote the American art historian Senta German about such octopus art from Knossos. The pottery on Crete was something for the rich, like porcelain in eighteenth-century courts. And the Minoan decorative art was very lively and playful in design. This graphic playfulness, which is over three thousand years old, seems to be honored by cartoonist Conrad Didier in this octopus vase quote in the fortieth Asterix The White Iris.