Marcel Broodthaers is one of the most elusive figures of modernism. For a long time, only a few connoisseurs appreciated the Belgian poet, who turned to the visual arts late in life at the age of 40. In 1997, documenta X led to his posthumous rediscovery and brought his work to the attention of the art world.
(...) Continue readingMarcel Broodthaers - Early artistic career as a Surrealist poet
Marcel Broodthaers was born on 28th January 1924 in Saint-Gilles/Sint-Gillis near Brussels. He felt called to art from an early age, but it was initially the poetic word that served him as an expression. The artist himself liked to tell the story of how, as a young poet and writer towards the end of the Second World War, he met the Belgian surrealist René Magritte and was introduced to the Groupe Surréaliste révolutionaire by his compatriot. In 1945, Marcel Broodthaers was able to present himself to the public for the first time with poems in the tradition of Surrealism and Symbolism. In 1947, he was one of the signatories of the surrealist manifesto Pas de quartiers dans la la revolution, and a decade later, published a volume of poetry. Although Broodthaers' focus remained on poetry until the mid-1960s, he had already taken an interest in other art forms earlier on, making his first film in 1957, which was dedicated to the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. He also worked as a journalist and antiquarian bookseller.
Art as a major challenge to the world order
Marcel Broodthaers saw his poetry as a disruption of the world order, as a means of questioning the established regime and its structures. Starting from this point of view, he realised that the visual arts allowed him to articulate his protest and criticism to a far greater extent and he decided to use them to expand his poetry. As part of a sensational art action in 1964, Broodthaers covered the remaining edition of his poetry collection Pense-Bête with plaster, rendering it illegible and transforming it into a sculpture. In doing so, he publicly laid his career as a poet to rest. Nevertheless, he by no means completely turned his back on word art; on the contrary, Broodthaers repeatedly incorporated conceptual art, the scope of which was now much broader: sophisticated collages, elaborate installations and intellectually thought-out constructions characterised the work of the Belgian, who moved to Düsseldorf in 1970. In the catalogues, he dissolved order and clarity by mixing pictorial and textual elements in a seemingly unstructured arbitrariness.
Signpost for the development of artistic generations
Marcel Broodthaers was not interested in creating individual objects, but in scrutinising and influencing the perception of art as a whole. To this end, he placed particular emphasis on the presentation of the works and even designed a fictitious Museum of Modern Art, which he himself presided over as curator and which he showed at documenta 5, among others. With this interpretation of art as institutional critique, he fascinated and overwhelmed critics and audiences alike. Broodthaers turned language and image into a large-scale interplay in which the boundary between form and content became blurred and the object could often no longer be distinguished from its surroundings. In an installation in 1972, he labelled each individual object with the ironic note ‘This is not a work of art’, referring to his early role model Magritte. The artist was not interested in any kind of specification; instead, he broke new ground with his art and set standards for the development of the visual arts of the generations that came after him.
Marcel Broodthaers died on 28th January 1976 in Cologne.
Marcel Broodthaers - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
