Marcel Broodthaers, the Belgian-born artist, was deeply influenced by the sense of poetic enigma found in the work of his fellow countryman, the painter René Magritte. "The works of Magritte that interested him most were those in which a written word contradicts a visual image, 'to the profit,' he said, 'of the subject'" (M. Compton, Marcel Broodthaers, London 1980, p. 15).

Common household items, like shoes, bottles, shirts or furniture; common workman's tools, like spades, carpenter's measures and ladders; simple words, letters, images--all the elements used by Broodthaers are, individually, easily recognised by the viewer. But when combined and presented by Broodthaers, these objects take on a poetic reality all their own that is greater than the sum of their individual realities.

It is the enigmatic quality of his work that made Broodthaers so difficult to place in the divergent movements of the 1960's and 1970's--another trait he held in common with Magritte, who practiced a highly personal form of Surrealism. Though his use of words and letters and the ephemeral nature of much of his work led him to be placed among the Conceptual artists, Broodthaers' form of Conceptual art is distinct from the more programmatic, philosophically-based art of many of his contemporaries--most notably, the art of Joseph Kosuth--and analagous to the poetry of the work of Lawrence Weiner.