Marcel Broodthaers. Musée à vendre

Exhibition at the Center for Artists’ Publications

“I, too, wondered if I couldn’t sell something and succeed in life. For some time I have been good for nothing. I am forty years old. Finally the idea came to my mind to invent something insincere, and on the spot I set to work. After three months had passed, I showed the results to Philippe Edouardo Toussaint, the owner of the St. Laurent Gallery. But, this is art, he said, and I will gladly exhibit it all. […]” Marcel Broodthaers formulated these sentences as an official invitation to his first exhibition, which took place in 1964 at the Galerie St. Laurent in Brussels. The exhibition and statement marked, on the one hand, the end of his unsuccessful ten years of work as a poet and writer and, on the other hand, the beginning of twelve years of artistic activity. In its simplicity, the sentence seems like an irony both with regard to his failed career as a poet and to a possible career as a visual artist.

And it was precisely on the borderline or in the intermediate area between art and literature that Marcel Broodthaers created an artistic œuvre in the 1960s and 1970s that became groundbreaking for the further development of contemporary art in general and for the emergence of artists’ publications in particular. Broodthaers continued to publish, reproduce, and publicize as he had been accustomed to doing as a writer, but now on the basis of pictorial-artistic parameters and without denying the literary ones. He had already become aware of the connection between art and literature through his participation in the Surrealist circle. He only changed sides and the view of what interested him. Thus, from 1964 onwards, numerous exhibition posters, films, photographs, graphics, artists’ books, multiples, open letters, tape recordings and magazines were created, not only conceived by him, but also based on his design guidelines. He has thus become active in almost all genres of artists’ publications. His tape recordings complete the triad of the intermedial – a fusion of visual art, experimental literature, and music – in his oeuvre of published artworks.

The fascination for works in the intermediate area of a poetic and artistic intention is what particularly connects the collector Manfred Schmidt and his wife with the œuvre of Marcel Broodthaers. Manfred Schmidt, who sees himself primarily as a book collector, is interested precisely in the connection between art and literature. And in this area, Marcel Broodthaers left behind a groundbreaking and multi-layered œuvre. The Schmidt Collection thus comprises an extremely representative stock of works by Marcel Broodthaers from this field. It contains not only all literary and artistic books and magazines, but also published texts and open letters, films, graphics, multiples, exhibition catalogs, and posters designed by Marcel Broodthaers. In the sense of a “Musée en miniature de Marcel Broodthaers,” the collection manifests and clarifies Broodthaers’ entire artistic output. It has been on loan to the Center for Artist’s Publications at the Weserburg since 1997, and has been repeatedly supplemented by Manfred Schmidt over the years with additional works by Broodthaers.

With the presentation of the works of Marcel Broodthaers, the exhibition of the Center for Artist’s Publications not only presents an artistic oeuvre that is particularly important for the field of artist’s publications, but also a collection that consistently deals with the work of the artist, who died 40 years ago and has almost doubled in size over the last 20 years. Marcel Broodthaers’ artistic intention aimed to investigate the framework conditions of artistic production and reception, or the relationship between art and society. Broodthaers asked about the definition of art as a social convention. In the context of the exhibition, the question arises, what has changed in the last 40 or 50 years?