.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Marcel Broodthaers’ Dix-neuf petits tableaux en pile (Nineteen small paintings in a pile) (1973) is an elegant example of the Belgian artist’s poetic, intellectually playful practice. It is also exactly what it purports to be. Broodthaers has taken nineteen canvases, painted them in a range of soft colours and assembled them into a neat stack. This significant work has featured in numerous prestigious exhibitions, including Broodthaers’ surveys at the Tate, London (1980) and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (1989-1990), which later toured to Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Brussels. Most recently it was exhibited in the acclaimed group exhibition Stop Painting (2021), curated by the Swiss artist Peter Fischli for the Fondazione Prada, Venice.
With the exception of one vivid red example that protrudes slightly from the structure, the canvases are piled up from largest to smallest, lending the work a ziggurat-like form. As critic Thomas McEvilley writes, ‘The painted canvases are stacked up to be experienced not as pictures but as sculptural presences, or mere mute matter’ (T. McEvilley, ‘Another alphabet: the art of Marcel Broodthaers, Artforum, November 1989, p. 109). In a review of the Venice exhibition, Christopher Turner compared Dix-neuf petits tableaux en pile to the works of the American Minimalist Donald Judd. Broodthaers, writes Turner, ‘makes a Juddlike sculpture out of canvases of diminishing size, showing what Fischli calls an “empathetic nostalgia” for painting, even among the avant-garde’ (C. Turner, ‘At the Fondazione Prada, painting refuses to play dead’, Apollo, 27 July 2021).
Broodthaers’ stacked canvases might also reference the artist’s own past. He spent twenty years as an unsuccessful poet before turning to visual art. His first artwork, Pense-Bête (1964), saw him embed fifty unsold copies of his final poetry collection in plaster, rendering them illegible. Broodthaers later recalled: ‘No one was curious about the text. Until that moment I had lived practically isolated from their point of view of communication’ (M. Broodthaers quoted in R. Haidu, The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964–1976, Cambridge, MA 2010, p. xxiv). The present work expands Broodthaers’ witty formal investigation of these ideas. With the exception of the topmost canvas, we largely perceive them through their sides, like the spines on a bookshelf. The canvases cannot speak to us with their usual language. In Dix-neuf petits tableaux en pile, Broodthaers challenges us to find a new way to converse with painting.
With the exception of one vivid red example that protrudes slightly from the structure, the canvases are piled up from largest to smallest, lending the work a ziggurat-like form. As critic Thomas McEvilley writes, ‘The painted canvases are stacked up to be experienced not as pictures but as sculptural presences, or mere mute matter’ (T. McEvilley, ‘Another alphabet: the art of Marcel Broodthaers, Artforum, November 1989, p. 109). In a review of the Venice exhibition, Christopher Turner compared Dix-neuf petits tableaux en pile to the works of the American Minimalist Donald Judd. Broodthaers, writes Turner, ‘makes a Juddlike sculpture out of canvases of diminishing size, showing what Fischli calls an “empathetic nostalgia” for painting, even among the avant-garde’ (C. Turner, ‘At the Fondazione Prada, painting refuses to play dead’, Apollo, 27 July 2021).
Broodthaers’ stacked canvases might also reference the artist’s own past. He spent twenty years as an unsuccessful poet before turning to visual art. His first artwork, Pense-Bête (1964), saw him embed fifty unsold copies of his final poetry collection in plaster, rendering them illegible. Broodthaers later recalled: ‘No one was curious about the text. Until that moment I had lived practically isolated from their point of view of communication’ (M. Broodthaers quoted in R. Haidu, The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964–1976, Cambridge, MA 2010, p. xxiv). The present work expands Broodthaers’ witty formal investigation of these ideas. With the exception of the topmost canvas, we largely perceive them through their sides, like the spines on a bookshelf. The canvases cannot speak to us with their usual language. In Dix-neuf petits tableaux en pile, Broodthaers challenges us to find a new way to converse with painting.