Marcel Broodthaers 11

A blurred portrait of Marcel Broodthaers, derived from a 1970 photograph, in which fluid washes destabilize the image and suspend identity within the act of painting.

Through a rigorous visual economy, the work engages a lineage of artists—Duchamp, Filliou, and Broodthaers—who conceived the museum as an artistic structure in itself. The square format introduces a logic of containment, aligning the painting with the conceptual architecture of the Davis Museum.

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€800

Product Details

Davis Lisboa, Marcel Broodthaers 11, 2020. Oil on linen, 40 × 40 × 3.5 cm (15.7 × 15.7 × 1.38 in).

Based on a photograph taken by Maria Gilissen—Marcel Broodthaers’ wife—in 1970 at the Zeeuws Museum, the work condenses a previously wider scene into a close-up, focusing on the artist at the moment he symbolically reconfigures the museum’s display cases within his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. The image operates simultaneously as a document and a painterly reconstruction.

The figure emerges from a blue surface, blurred and unstable, built through layers of paint applied with a lightness approaching watercolor. These veils soften contours and position the image between appearance and disappearance, shifting representation into a suspended state.

The work situates itself within a narrative of artists who created their own museums as a form of practice: from Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise to Robert Filliou’s Galerie Légitime and Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. This lineage is reactivated here through a restrained visual language grounded in reduction and precision.

Executed in oil on linen, the square format introduces a logic of containment. As part of The Paintings Section from Davis Museum, the work engages a broader system in which portrait and object converge within a shared institutional structure.