Musée des Aigles Modernes 12

Conceptually, this painting draws on a black-and-white photograph of the installation “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section XIXème Siècle,” created by Marcel Broodthaers in his residence at 30 rue de la Pépinière, Brussels. Between September 27, 1968, and September 27, 1969, Broodthaers assembled a fictional and conceptual museum that included a ladder, several empty art-shipping crates—supplied by the company Continentale Menkès—and postcards reproducing canonical nineteenth-century artworks. The crates, imprinted with shipping labels and logos, transformed logistical infrastructure into museographic display, staging a compelling tension between physical absence and symbolic presence. Through this mise-en-scène, the installation interrogated the museum’s institutional authority and its assumptions concerning authenticity and the reproducibility of art.

Formally, the painting references Pierre Bonnard’s intimate depictions of domestic interiors, translating his quiet visual sensibility into a compositional language that synthesizes pictorial expression with spatial strategies akin to installation.

Ultimately, the work aligns itself with a critical lineage of artists who have founded their own museums as poetic and political interventions: Marcel Duchamp’s “Boîte-en-valise” (1936–1941), Robert Filliou’s “La Galerie Légitime” (1962–1963), and Broodthaers’s own “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles” (1968–1972). In engaging this tradition, the painting invites reflection on the museum as a conceptual construct, extending beyond its institutional boundaries.