Marcel Broodthaers (1924 - 1976)
Related: art in Belgium - modern art
Marcel Broodthaers - Freddy De Vree [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Biography
Marcel Broodthaers (1924 - 1976), was a Belgian surrealist with a highly literate and often witty approach to creating art works. He was associated with the Groupe Surréaliste-revolutionaire in Brussels from 1945 and dabbled in journalism, film, and poetry until focusing on the production of art after 1960. He worked principally with assemblies of found objects and collage, often containing written texts. His most noted work was an installation in his Brussels apartment which he called "Musée d'Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles" (1968), and was later reconstructed at the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle for an exhibition in 1972. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Broodthaers [Feb 2005]
Sculpture in Belgium
The Legacy of Broodthaers
By Susan Canning
For the generation of artists born after WWII, Marcel Broodthaers was a hard act to follow. He irrevocably changed the process for viewing and understanding art. Today, young Belgian artists are adapting his strategies.
Although he produced art for only 12 years, the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers initiated a critique of post-war Modernist art practice that remains central to the concerns of Belgian sculptors who have emerged in the two decades since his death in 1976. Broodthaers began his career making sculptural objects from the discarded materials of the good life. Mussel and egg shells-containers or molds that shaped their contents over a period of time-became for the artist apt metaphors for the process of making art and the pleasurable rewards of middle-class taste. Fragile and without function or value, these shells were paired by the artist with materials from the art world such as paint, geometric forms, canvases, frames, and pedestals. To make art out of life was not unusual in this period. Broodthaers's contemporaries Piero Manzoni, Joseph Beuys, George Segal, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg also drew inspiration and materials from everyday life. But the Belgian artist exposed the rupture between the artwork and the aesthetized object as well as calling attention to the lack of originality or uniqueness within artistic production, which gave his art its peculiar parodic thrust.
--http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag97/belgium/sm-belgm.htmMarcel Broodthaers: Oeuvres 1963-1975 - Freddy De Vree
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