Marcel Broodthaers valuation
A poet until he was forty, then the man who opened a museum that did not exist.
Marcel Broodthaers was born in Brussels in 1924 and spent twenty years as a poet, bookseller and photographer before, at forty, embedding fifty unsold copies of his own poetry collection in plaster and calling it art.
What a work by Marcel Broodthaers is worth
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Bio
Marcel Broodthaers was born in Brussels in 1924 and spent twenty years as a poet, bookseller and photographer before, at forty, embedding fifty unsold copies of his own poetry collection in plaster and calling it art. That was 1964. Twelve years of work followed, ending with his death in 1976 on his fifty-second birthday. The central project was the Musee d'Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles, a fictional museum he founded in his own apartment in 1968 and ran through a series of sections, complete with crates, postcards, wall labels and an eagle-based collection, as a sustained argument about how institutions confer value. Mussels, eggshells and pots recur throughout.
Broodthaers made a great many editions, printed works, plaques and films, and these constitute most of what changes hands. The vacuum-formed plastic plaques and the printed open letters are catalogued and should be identified precisely. The unique assemblages with organic material — mussel shells, eggshells — are physically delicate and have often been conserved. Because so much of the work is documentation, ephemera and printed matter, completeness and the presence of original wrappers, envelopes and inserts affect value considerably.
At a glance
- Born
- 28 January 1924, Saint-Gilles
- Died
- 28 January 1976, Cologne
- Movement
- Conceptual art
More on Wikipedia.
Pense-Bête, the décors and the books
The fifty copies set in plaster were of his collection of poems Pense-Bête. From 1967 he made more than fifty short films, and in 1974 he opened three exhibitions of what he called décors in a single week, at Wide White Space in Antwerp, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Kunstmuseum in Basel.
From late 1969 he lived mainly in Düsseldorf, Berlin and London, and he died in Cologne. His artist's books were published with institutions including the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and the DAAD in Berlin, and Photographieren Verboten exists in two versions, from the DAAD and from the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. Tate gave him an exhibition in 1980, and later retrospectives were held at the Walker Art Center, the Jeu de Paume and the Palais des Beaux-Arts.
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