Marcel Broodthaers

Marcel Broodthaers' work spanned different mediums and included a range of activities that make ironic use of museum-like modes of display, to the point of emptying them of meaning. Broodthaers often used images from his collections of paintings and books, and was deeply interested in 19^th century culture. In the work Images d'Épinal (1974), he created an inventory of popular lithographs, a technological invention that accelerated the mechanical distribution of images. This type of imagery was named after the city Epinal, once home to a famous publisher of popular prints. Broodthaers' act of copying the existing images, and their classification according to irrational categories brings to mind Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet - two Parisian bachelors who copy everything that comes their way, creating poetic categories such as "The Beauty of History" or "The Crimes of Religion." Like Flaubert's imaginary characters, Broodthaers' work constitutes an ironic commentary, which undermines the museum's underlying pretense of ordering objects and images into a coherent narrative.

The film A Voyage on the North Sea (1973-1974) is composed of still images inscribed with page numbers, which produce a cinematic sequence experienced much like reading a book. The film is composed of photographs and closeups of a 19^th century amateur painting of fishermen's boats at sea, alongside images of real sailboats photographed by Broodthaers. The film is edited so that our gaze moves from typical 19^th century boats to 20^th century sailboats captured against an urban background, creating a contrast between old and new and between different mediums: painting and photography, cinema and literature, as well as between different points of view. Using closeups, cropping and repetition, Broodthaers creates a "journey" into the history of images in the age of mechanical reproduction - from painting to photography and film. By means of this multiplication of mediums, he points to the accelerated pace at which images are produced and circulated, and hints at the possibility of dynamic change in the digital age. By bringing together different mediums, Broodthaers presents a disrupted connection between image, word and meaning. The artistic "object" he has created relates to André Malraux's concept of a "museum without walls," which foresaw the connection between modern means of reproduction and the rise of a new relativity that undoes the hierarchical relations between objects and categories, transforming them all into printed images of equal value. The use Broodthaers makes of reproductions poetically addresses the transformation of the artistic object in the age of mass consumption, and expands upon exhibition practices by using fictional materials and 19^th century works and by blurring the distinction between the categories of exhibition and display.  Indeed, Broodthaers foresaw the transformation of artmaking, in the postmodern age, into a branch of the culture industry.

1924 - 1976, born in Brussels; lived and worked in Brussels and Cologne