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MACBA Classics

Art, Words and Marcel Broodthaers

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Marcel Broodthaers. L'Art et les mots. 1973

Between 1972 and 1973, Marcel Broodthaers produced his Peintures littéraires: pictorial canvases where words, phrases and dates have been mechanically printed. Even though they are “paintings”, the artist did not execute them himself, but rather commissioned them to be made from a printing press: thus, they are not unique objects, and more than one copy of them were made.

However, when he first presented them, he exhibited them simultaneously in several spaces. Broodthaers thus responded to the crisis of painting and representation posed by minimalism and conceptualism. A catalyst for many current discourses and practices, he worked from within pictorial practice but freed himself from the nostalgia of the past. He operated from writing but as an outsider from the literary world, thus upsetting commonplace categorisations. Among his literary paintings, L’art et les mots is a selfreferential staging of the relationship between art and language. As Broodthaers wrote, “the language of forms must meet with that of words.”