Marcel Broodthaers

Marcel Broodthaers (1924-1976) was a Belgian poet, filmmaker and artist. Broodthaers worked as a poet before turning to visual arts and, with skepticism and irony, created films, drawings and installations. He produced over fifty different films between 1967 and his death in 1976, including La clef de l’horloge (1958), a homage to Kurt Schwitters, Le corbeau et le renard (1967) and La pluie (1969). In 1963, he started producing visual art, after being declared a certified “Living Sculpture” by Italian artist Piero Manzoni a year earlier. His first solo show was in 1964 at Galerie St. Laurent in Brussels, where he unveiled his first piece, Pense-Bête, a work in which he encased the unsold copies of his final volume of poetry of the same name in plaster. From 1968 to 1972, he operated the Musée d’Art Moderne. Département des Aigles [Museum of Modern Art. Department of Eagles], a traveling museum dedicated not to his work as an artist but to the role of the institution itself and the function of art in society. His short, though highly productive “career” in art would ultimately span only twelve years but would be of great influence to the development of art in the 20th century.