16 Facts About Marcel Broodthaers

Marcel Broodthaers was a Belgian poet, filmmaker, and visual artist.

Marcel Broodthaers was briefly associated with the surrealists after World War II and took part in the beginnings of "surrealisme-revolutionnaire" in 1947.

Marcel Broodthaers performed the symbolic act of embedding fifty unsold copies of his book of poems Pense-Bete in plaster, creating his first art object.

Marcel Broodthaers later worked principally with assemblies of found objects and collage, often containing written texts.

Marcel Broodthaers filled each story with uniform glass jars, and in every jar he placed an identical image taken from an illustrated magazine, of the eye of a beautiful young woman.

From 1968 to 1975 Marcel Broodthaers produced large-scale environmental pieces that reworked the very notion of the museum.

Marcel Broodthaers's most noted work was an installation which began in his Brussels house which he called Musee d'Art Moderne, Department des Aigles, containing different representations of eagles in glass cases that were accompanied by signs that asserted "This is not a work of art", implying that museums obscure the ideological functioning of images by imposing illegitimate classifications of value.

In 1974, Marcel Broodthaers launched three separate exhibitions in the same week, each consisting of a new type of installation artwork he referred to as "decors".

In 1975 Marcel Broodthaers presented the exhibition "L'Angelus de Daumier" at the Centre National d'Art Contemporain in Paris, at which each room had the name of a colour.

Marcel Broodthaers made his first film in 1957, and from 1967 he produced over 50 short films in documentary, narrative, and experimental styles.

Marcel Broodthaers collaborated with Belgian director Jean Harlez, who worked as cameraman on around a dozen of his films over a period of many years.

From late 1969, Marcel Broodthaers lived mainly in Dusseldorf, Berlin, and finally London.

Marcel Broodthaers died on 28 January 1976 in Cologne, Germany, of a liver disease, on his 52nd birthday.

Marcel Broodthaers is buried at Ixelles Cemetery in Brussels under a tombstone of his own design which was realized by sculptor Karel Van Roy in Beernem, Belgium.

In 1980, the exhibition "Marcel Broodthaers" was mounted by the Tate Gallery, London.

An important solo exhibition of the film work, "Marcel Broodthaers: Cinema", was shown at Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Barcelona; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela, and Kunsthalle Dusseldorf in.