Marcel broodthaers moma new york

In 1968, the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers declared himself the director of his own conceptual institution, the “Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles.” For the next four years, the traveling museum took on several iterations, culminating in an exhibition of hundreds of eagle-themed images and figurines.

Marcel broodthaers biography

Marcel broodthaers musée d art moderne

Marcel broodthaers installation art

Marcel Broodthaers was a poet and bookseller until age forty, when he turned to Conceptual art by creating a sculptural work composed of fifty copies of one.

An untitled artwork by the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers combines eggshells with the colors of the Belgian flag at a retrospective at the Museum of Modern.

Broodthaers chose the bird of prey, he said, because it was an emblem of “greatness, authority, power”— qualities he wanted to emasculate, or at least cast into doubt.

Ironically, Broodthaers, who died in 1976, has become something of an eagle himself—a totemic, untouchable figure in the field of postwar European art.

Meanwhile, the weird, kitschy Museum of Eagles has become enshrined in art history as a heroic, pioneering example of Institutional Critique. Broodthaers’s new retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art offers a more intimate view of the poet turned late-avant-gardist.

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