Working primarily as a poet until turning to the visual arts in 1964, Marcel Broodthaers produced a body of work distinguished for its self-referential qualities. His installations, sculptures and films sought to examine the essence of art and posed existential questions surrounding the nature of language and rhetoric. Over his 12-year career as a visual artist, Broodthaers brought to life, primarily in paintings and sculpture, his analyses of the interplay between art and its societal framework. Specifically, the Belgian artist sought to use his work as a way of confronting the crisis of painting, as posed by the movements of Minimalism and Conceptualism, beginning to arise in the 1960s and 1970s. 

“I am the result of an experiment – the word is perhaps a little strong – let’s say of a taste for literature, definitely; that was my starting point; however, I do believe I am now able to express myself on the edge of things, where the world of visual arts and the world of poetry might eventually, I wouldn’t say meet, but at the very frontier where they part.”

—Marcel Broodthaers

Created just three years before the artist’s death, Figures, 1973, is one of the artist’s “Peintures littéraires.” Each of the works in this series are comprised of nine canvases adorned with text, installed in a specific layout. Despite the title of the series, the phrases, such as “Le fou” (the madman), “La méduse” (the jellyfish), “Le citron” (lemon), and “Le sexe” (sex), are not hand-painted, but printed—another aspect which challenges the notion of what constitutes a painting. Like Pop and Minimalist artists in the U.S. who were relying more and more on mechanical processes, Broodthaers commissioned these works to be made by a printing press. 

The nouns typed like headers and conclusions serve as bookends at the top and bottom of each canvas, and in the center of the otherwise blank space are variously numbered and lettered “figures.”  Each canvas features differently colored text, and yet the colors have seemingly no visual relation to the words they display. This furthers the artist’s challenge of the viewer’s preconceived notions about what a painting is meant to represent. Instead of providing depictions of the words, Broodthaers chooses to place ambiguous "fig." references—ones a reader would find in a book beneath an image. In addition to the canvases which address specific objects or actions, there are three canvases in which the words at the top and bottom are identical – gestalt, bild and abbildung, translating to shape, picture and illustration. These more general terms, used to describe specific parts of a typical painting, emphasize the notion that a combination of different shapes, pictures and illustrations are what creates and defines things like "Le pipe," "La bouteille," etc. As Broodthaers wrote, “the language of forms must be reunited with that of words.”ⁱ

ⁱ Marcel Broodthaers, quoted in Michael Compton, “In Praise of the Subject,” Marcel Broodthaers, exh. cat., Minneapolis, 1989, p. 40.

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