Picture-Puzzles

Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers worked in a number of areas before finding his vocation. As a young man, attracted by the smells and colours — if not the formulae — of experimentation, he commenced an apprenticeship in chemistry, but soon decided to take up a career in banking instead. Later he became a museum guide and a rather eccentric book-dealer, specializing in books on animals and developing a love of works by authors such as La Fontaine, Lewis Carroll and Edgar Allan Poe. His earliest major interest, however, was poetry, and in 1957 he published his first volume of poems entitled Mon livre d’ogre [My Book of Beasts]. That same year he took up photography and began to make films, but because he was working in isolation these ventures met with no financial success.

In 1964, dogged by poverty, Broodthaers turned to making prints and multiples — in order ‘to have something to sell’. From the outset his prints incorporated words as images, while at the same time revealing the influence of the artist’s long-standing interest in poetry. Crossing the boundaries between the visual and the literary, many of these prints function as 'picture-puzzles', achieving their effect through the use of visual puns, unlikely arrangements of familiar objects, and the quirky or nonsensical juxtaposition of ideas.

Initially bi-lingual in French and Flemish and later conversant with other European languages, Broodthaers was fascinated with words and their meaning throughout his life. From this profound respect for language developed the interest in visual puns that was to inform so much of the artist's work.

Les Animaux de la ferme [Animals of the farm/firm], 1974, in which the French word 'ferme' has two meanings — 'farm' and 'firm' — is one example of Broodthaers's punning technique. By means of a sophisticated play on words, he implies that the only firms in his small country of Belgium are its farmyard cows and bulls, and reinforces this notion by naming the animals 'Cadillac', 'Fiat, 'Ford' etc, Two other prints of 1974, Citron-Citroen (Réclame pour la Mer du Nod) [Lemon-Citroen (Advertisement for the North Sea)] and La Souris écrit rat (à compte d’auteur [The mouse writes rat (according to the author)], further demonstrate the artists wit as a visual punster.

In other prints Broodthaers arranged familiar objects in unfamiliar and often ironic ways. In the aptly titled Gedicht/Poem/Poème, 1973, for example, he took his own initials 'MB' and repeated them over and over again — as if they were lines of poetry. Similarly in Atlas, 1975, he took the recognizable shapes of countries of the world and made each a similar size with no regard for scale. He then ordered these 'countries' in rows, alphabetically, as if arranging a map of a flat earth. On this idiosyncratic atlas he wrote whimsically ‘Conquest of space for the use of artists and the military’.

It was always Broodthaers’s concern that what he considered to be the trappings of the art world — the obsession with the artist's signature, the exhibition display and the sale of postcards — seemed more important than the art itself. The idea of the museum as a money-making venture for the promotion of art as a commodity became the subject of Museum-Museum, 1972. This two-part screenprint depicted not the art of the museum but gold ingots bearing the names of famous artists such as 'Watteau', 'Ingres' and 'Duchamp'. In a further ironic twist, the artist lists on the second sheet of the composition commodities such as 'Butter' and 'Meat to emphasize the trivialization of art.

As a young man, Broodthaers had fallen under the spell of fellow Belgian artist René Magritte (1898-1967) — who represented such an awe-inspiring figure that he avoided his company for twenty years. An important Surrealist, Magritte had belonged to an earlier generation of artists and often created his strange, dreamlike images by showing commonplace objects, or personal attributes such as a bowler-hat or pipe, out of their familiar context.

On a number of occasions Broodthaers followed in his predecessor's footsteps. In the two-part work Das Recht [The law] (Nicht Rauchen/Défense de Fumer/No Smoking), 1972, he appropriated Magritte's motif of the bowler-hat, alluded to the pipe motif by the use of clouds of smoke, and placed both next to 'No Smoking' signs in three languages: signs such as might be found in European trains or railway stations. By thus subverting the notion of context, Broodthaers, like Magritte before him, was able to produce curious, enigmatic compositions.

Jane Kinsman, Picture-Puzzles: The Prints of Marcel Broodthauers, exhibition brochure, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1987.