In 1942 Marcel Broodthaers started studying chemistry at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He dropped out the following year to devote himself to poetry. In 1943, he joined the Communist Party and in 1947 he was a signatory to the pamphlet La Cause est entendue, published in Paris against André Breton by the Surrealist Revolutionaries of France and Belgium.
Between 1957 and 1964, this fan of René Magritte and Stéphane Mallarmé published four collections of poems (Mon livre d’Ogre - 1957, Minuit - 1960, La Bête Noire - 1962 and Pense-Bête - 1964) [1]. At the same time, in Paris or Brussels, Marcel Broodthaers worked in numerous fields such as art critic, bookshop keeper, photographer, director, second-hand bookseller, plumber, guide-lecturer, night watchman; but above all he was active as a poet before becoming a visual artist as well.
On the invitation for his first exhibition at the Galerie Saint-Laurent, in Brussels, Marcel Broodthaers set the tone by declaring the following about his entrance into the art world: “I also wondered if I could sell something and succeed in life. I’ve been a good-for-nothing for a while now. I am forty years old… The idea of inventing something insincere crossed my mind and I immediately started to work on it (…)”[2]. Broodthaers thus made saleable objects, of which Pense-bête (1964) constitutes the founding act of his praxis as well as a spectacular gesture which makes him the most influential Belgian artist of the post-war period: in the footprints of Marcel Duchamp, he cast the unsold copies of his poem Pense-bête in plaster, which then became a work of art.
Musée d’Art Moderne. Département des Aigles, Section XIXe siècle also occupies an important place in the oeuvre of the artist. The museum opened in 1968 at Broodthaers’ home (rue de la Pépinière, Brussels) and was closed in 1972 (Documenta in Kassel, Germany). Inaugurated in the context of May 1968, the (fictitious) Modern Art Museum dissects notions related to museums, the art market, reproduction, etc. by means of elements, which do not have the status of artworks. The entire project, in various forms and in several countries, is a “critique on the ideology of art and art as ideology”[3]; making him one of the most explicit conceptual artists of his time. This work is essentially an interrogation on the nature and function of language through art.
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[1] About the texts published by Marcel Broothaers (around 200) and his constant relationship with writing, see: LAHOUREUX, Denis, “Broodthaers et le moule des mots”, in : Textyles, n°40, 2011, p.33-42.
[2] BROODTHAERS, Marcel, in : Invitation to the exposition. Bruxelles, Galerie Saint Laurent, 1964.
[3] DAVID, Catherine, “Le musée du signe”, in : Marcel Broodthaers. Paris – Madrid, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume – Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 1991-1992, p.17.
