Musée des Aigles Modernes 23

This painting takes as its point of departure a photograph of Wilhelm II of Germany (1859–1941), the last German Emperor and King of Prussia. The image focuses on one of his most emphatic attributes: the ceremonial helmet surmounted by an eagle. This emblem connects the work to Marcel Broodthaers’s Section des Figures: Der Adler vom Oligozän bis heute (1972), part of his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, where the eagle was subjected to a deliberately heterogeneous taxonomy that destabilized museological conventions and exposed their relationship to power and authority.

The translation of the photograph into oil painting shifts the historical document toward a material and subjective image. Visible brushwork, dense layers of paint, and figurative economy concentrate the gaze on the face, the helmet, and, above all, the eagle emerging against an intensely pictorial red field. The background ceases to function as descriptive space and instead operates as an autonomous chromatic surface, while the simplification of the features distances the painting from photographic precision. The imperial portrait is thus transformed into an ambiguous sign: simultaneously a historical figure, a political emblem, and an archival image.

The work belongs to The Paintings Section from Davis Museum Barcelona, where painting functions as a device for appropriating and reclassifying images associated with the history of artist-created museums. From Duchamp and his Boîte-en-valise, through Robert Filliou’s Galerie légitime and Broodthaers’s fictional museum, this genealogy finds a new articulation in Davis Museum Barcelona, founded in 2009 as a miniature museum, readymade sculpture, collective art project, collection, and archive, and officially recognized as a cultural entity by the Generalitat de Catalunya.