Marcel Broodthaers

Marcel Broodthaers ( born January 28, 1924 in Saint-Gilles, Brussels, † January 28, 1976 in Cologne) was a Belgian artist.

Life and work

Broodthaers learned as a young author and poet end of the Second World War, René Magritte know and was with the group in the Belgian Surrealists ( Groupe Surréaliste Révolutionaire ). 1945 Broodthaers went public, who stood in the tradition of Symbolism and Surrealism first poems. In 1947 he signed the written by Surrealist Manifesto "Pas de quartiers dans la révolution ". 1957 appeared a volume of poetry. In the same year his first film, " La Clef de l' Horloge - Un poème en l' honneur de cinématographique Kurt Schwitters " was born. Broodthaers worked until the early 1960s, as a writer of poems and essays, among others in Paris, of the aesthetic positions of Rimbaud and Mallarmé update and continue to think this coming. In parallel, he is in contact with representatives of the " New Realism ", but this also goes against their own ways.

In 1964, he decided to be an artist, and made his first exhibition with surprising objects made ​​of shells, egg shells and other materials that already suggest per se references to artistic forms. Famous is his gesture to transform volumes of his poetry book " Pense Bête " in 1964 in a sculpture by enveloped them with plaster and made such unreadable. For Marcel Broodthaers, among other things, the museum operation, the art market and contemporary art theories were the subject of his artistic work. At the same time he questioned in further development of the work of his compatriot René Magritte, the contradictions between word and image, but passed early in the limits of painting by creating installations, sculptures, artists' books, photographs and films. In preparing its questioning of the social role of the museum he founded in 1968 in his apartment in Brussels a "Museum of Modern Art " and devoted to this in the form of various museum sections a number of large installations that belong to the most beautiful and smartest thing in this then new genus been made ​​to date. Thus he created a variety of both critically reflected and poetically complex and unique works. To find, for example Magritte's famous painting "This is not a pipe " ( " Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ) an institution- critical reversal in the humorous dictum " This is not a work of art " (1972 ), which referred in one of his installations each individual object. In many respects Broodthaers ' work is regarded as crucial to the development of the visual arts in the 1980s and 1990s. He has set standards for an art that mitbedenkt their social relations and the claim of sovereign autonomy of art does not give up, but keeps reinventing himself: "Il resterait alors à savoir si l'art existe ailleurs que sur un plan négatif. " ( Marcel Broodthaers )

1970 Marcel Broodthaers settled in Dusseldorf, moved to London and after a DAAD residency in Berlin finally to Cologne, where he died in 1976.

Works (selection)

Publications / artist books (selection)

Exhibitions (selection)

Posthumously exhibitions (selection)