Musée–Museum

Musée-Museum is part of Broodthaers's Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, the fictional museum he developed between 1968 and 1972. Part parody and part protest against what he saw as the inadequacies and problematic nationalism of art institutions at the time, Broodthaers’s museum featured no permanent collection or location but instead took shape as twelve "sections" (including a Figures Section and Cinema Section) realized through a series of installations planned by the artist. Here, Section of the Nineteenth Century —in which shipping crates and postcards stand in for original artworks—is represented through floor plans. This print was made in one hundred impressions and in two variants. The first (numbers one to sixty) features three color-postcard additions picturing works by nineteenth-century French painters Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Gustave Courbet; the second (numbers sixty-one to one hundred) includes two postcards showing works by Ingres only.

Credit: Partial gift of the Daled Collection and partial purchase through the generosity of Maja Oeri and Hans Bodenmann, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, Agnes Gund, Marlene Hess and James D. Zirin, Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis, and Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley