Marcel Broodthaers
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. 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.
If you own a work by Marcel Broodthaers
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.