Literature

Other jars are part of the following institutions:

- National Galleries of Scotland (La Tour visuelle, 1966); Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne (La Tour de Babel, 1966); MoMa, NY (Eye in a Plastic Container, 1966); MoMA, New York (Mouth in a Preserve Jar, 1965); Museum Voorlinden (La Caméra qui regarde, 1966), Collection Pinault (Le Salon noir, 1966); Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Bruxelles (Bocal de confiserie,1965 & L’Œil, 1965)

“It was by plastering the last fifty copies of his last poetry booklet (Pense-Bête) that Marcel Broodthaersconfirmed in 1964 his farewell to the form of expression to which he had until then devoted himself and with which he signed in at the same time a pact with a universe (art) with opposing values. His “official” intrusion into the art world the same year in Brussels was accompanied by an invitation card on which he crudely announced: “I too wondered if I could not sell something and succeed in life.” Marcel Broodthaers is 40 years old. Until now, he has worked in all professions, from the most prosaic (mover, lecturer) to the most poetic (journalist, photographer and bookseller). But it is poetry which remains the common thread of his entire artistic life, even when he leaves the restricted domain of poetry. Although he pays numerous homages to the poetry of Mallarmé and Baudelaire, his work remains crossed by the question of literature and the question of the book. From the end of the 1960s until his death in 1976, Broodthaers constituted a reference that was both decisive and marginal in contemporary art. He thus accompanies the adventure of conceptual art in an original way through his objects, his publications, his films, his installations and his general attitude. This is how M.B. became a sociologist, historian, art critic and even curator of the “collection” of the Musée d’Art Moderne Département des Aigles which would be the subject of the dozen exhibitions he organised between 1968 and 1972.”

-Bernard Marcadé