Marcel Broodthaers. Cinéma

His talent for reinventing the language of art made Marcel Broodthaers (Brussels, 1924 – Cologne, 1976) one of the most creative artists of the second half of the 20th century.

His work is a symbiosis of all the artistic disciplines: “I am not a filmmaker. For me, film is the extension of language. I begin with poetry, then visual art, and finally cinema which brings together several different elements of art. Which is to say: writing (poetry), the object (visual art), and the image (film). The difficult thing, of course, is the harmony between these elements.” For Broodthaers, catalogues, books and exhibitions are films which in turn become part of subsequent exhibitions and publications.

Film played an essential role in Marcel Broodthaers’s artistic production. It was one of his preferred visual media and the key to understanding his work and aims. Broodthaers’s cinema expresses his impulse to continually reinvent and to create, in his own words, “something insincere”. Broodthaers always accepts the responsibility of representation, that is, the need to translate the essentiality of the world to the language of film through an extremely subtle and even hermetic use of rhetoric.

The Fundació Antoni Tàpies presented Marcel Broodthaers’s work in the two aspects conceived by the artist: film as such and film as an exhibition, turning the Fundació rooms into cinemas showing a broad selection of Broodthaers’s films and exhibition spaces displaying the installations and objects Broodthaers used in his films.

With this exhibition and catalogue the Fundació Antoni Tàpies wanted to provide a new understanding of Broodthaers’s artistic enterprise from the time of his early pieces to his major projects, such as the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles and the Décors.