Marcel Broodthaers

Marcel Broodthaers (born January 28, 1924, Brussels, Belgium—died January 28, 1976, Cologne, West Germany) was a Belgian multimedia artist who began his career as a poet and then turned to visual arts and, with skepticism and irony, created films, drawings, installations, prints, and works composed of found objects. He became well regarded by artists, writers, and critics for his constant irreverence for and questioning of traditional modes of artistic expression and exhibition.

Broodthaers began writing as a teenager and left college to pursue a bohemian lifestyle among the artists, writers, and intellectuals of Brussels. He served briefly with the Belgian resistance during World War II and then joined the Communist Party in 1943. His first published poem appeared in 1945 in the literary journal Le Ciel Bleu, and he went on to publish more poetry as well as political articles and prose in other periodicals. He also had a job with an antiquarian bookseller. Despite that income. however, he struggled to make ends meet and lived at the edge of poverty for most of his adult life. In 1945 Broodthaers met Surrealist artist René Magritte, whose unusual paintings and their incorporation of puzzling phrases and language had a lasting impact on Broodthaers’s work as a poet, a thinker, and an artist. During the late 1940s Broodthaers was closely involved with the Belgian Surrealist artists and writers, many of whom also identified politically as Communists.

In 1957 Broodthaers published his first book of poems (Mon livre d’ogre [“My Ogre Book”]) and produced his first short film, La Clef de l’horloge, un poème cinématographique en l’honneur de Kurt Schwitters (“The Key to the Clock, a Cinematic Poem in Honour of Kurt Schwitters”). Broodthaers set that film in an exhibition of Dadaist Schwitters’s works. He edited his film in such a way as to suggest Schwitters’s own methodology for his assemblages. Schwitters was also an important influence for Broodthaers.

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Upon recognizing that visual artists (as opposed to poets) were earning a living through their work, in 1964 Broodthaers announced his career change from poet to artist. With irony and in the irreverent Dadaist tradition, he explained his decision as such: “I, too, wondered if I could not sell something and succeed in life.…Finally, the idea of inventing something insincere finally crossed my mind, and I set to work straightaway.” Later that year he had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Saint-Laurent in Brussels, in which he showed one of his first—and to this day one of his best-known—artworks: the witty Pense-bête (translated variously as “Memory Aid,” “Think Beast,” and “Think Stupid”), a stack of unsold copies of his last book of poems (published 1963), which he “transformed” into sculpture by embedding them in plaster. For other works he took everyday objects, such as brass cymbals (1964), and applied either paint or plaster to transform them into art objects. He also made many works from eggshells, mussel shells, newspapers, coal, and other refuse that was cheap and accessible (e.g., The Black Problem in Belgium, 1963–64; The Grandmother, 1964; Triumph of Mussel I, 1965; I Return to Matter, I Rediscover the Tradition of the Primitives, Painting with Egg, Painting with Egg, 1966; and Panel of Mussels, 1966 and 1968).

Broodthaers announced in 1968 that he would no longer make art but would instead become director of a museum of his own invention, the Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles. Through exhibitions that he called “sections,” which were composed primarily of reproductions (postcards, projections, etc.) of art from different periods in art history, he used his new “position” as an opportunity to comment on the role of museums. His final museum exhibit was devoted to imagery, in two and three dimensions, related to the eagle (“Figures Section: The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present,” May 1972).

He ended the museum project in 1972 and returned to making art. The most-recognized works from his last years were installations, or period rooms, that he called “Décors,” which, when translated from the French, can mean “installations,” “theatres,” or “film sets.” In his Décors he included juxtapositions of his old and new works, as well as props and interior decor from old films. The life-size installations make reference to and comment on past historical eras and political and social issues. Some of his best-known Décors include A Winter Garden II (1974), Décor: A Conquest and Bricks (1975), and The White Room (1975), which was a full-scale unfurnished replica of his studio in Brussels but with its walls scattered with words related to art. The White Room was shown in Paris in 1975, at the last exhibition of his work before his death. Over the course of his 12-year art career, Broodthaers worked in numerous media, traditional and nontraditional, had some 70 solo exhibitions (in addition to participating in group exhibitions), and made a lasting impact on artists of later generations, who respected his unique ability to work both within and without the art establishment.