馬塞爾·布達埃爾

Galerie MTL, Brussels

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1976 

Brussels, Galerie MTL, Culture Internationale, September - October 1974

Basel, Kunstmuseum Basel, Marcel Broodthaers: Éloge du Sujet, October - November 1974

Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Marcel Broodthaers, December 1991 - June 1992 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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At the time of his death at age 31, the daring bank robber John Herbert Dillinger had been declared Public Enemy No. 1 by the FBI and had become a household name in America. In little more than a year, Dillinger had robbed several banks, escaped from two jails, eluded police traps and killed at least one police officer. In the middle of a heatwave in July 1934, Dillinger became trapped in a cinema and surrounded by more than 20 law-enforcement officers. During a dramatic shoot out that killed 24 people, Dillinger was hit in the back of the neck by a bullet that would kill one of the most infamous and sought after criminals in the history of America, a figure whose name has since been elevated to legendary status.

Precisely forty years after Dillinger’s death, the Belgium artist Marcel Broodthaers embarked on an important and small series of paintings that repeated the names of some of the most iconic criminals in modern history: Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and John Dillinger. Entitled Culture Internationale, this series was specifically conceived on the occasion of two major exhibitions of Broodthaers’ works: Culture Internationale at the Galerie MTL and Catalogue-Catalogus at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, both in Brussels. In the present work, the name of John Dillinger is broadcast in bold black capital letters as well as the date, 1974, on nine unstretched canvases that are arranged in three rows of three. Underneath Dillinger's name on each canvas are the names of other legendary criminals in a small, almost illegible typefont. The solely monochrome palette is poignantly punctuated by a red heart in the middle of the central canvas, the only splash of colour in the work.

The aesthetic of this particular series is strongly reminiscent of the clean lines familiar to the prevailing trend of Minimalism, whilst the criminal’s name printed in the centre is a nod to popular culture and the nationwide preoccupation and fascination with villains. Broodthaers was well versed in the art of his contemporaries and thus the subject of criminals is strongly reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s preoccupation with American gangsters. In Warhol's series of Most Wanted Men, he enlarged mug shots from an NYPD booklet featuring the 13 most wanted criminals of 1962. Contrary to Warhol, Broodthaers denies the viewer the visual allure and seduction of Warhol’s silkscreen imagery, instead evoking an imaginative pictorial space through the use of words. In the present work, we are neither confronted with imagery nor with the names of contemporary gangsters that relate to our everyday life, rather we encounter a series of names that are familiar not because of their actual presence but because of their mythical power as propagated by popular culture. In this complex and fascinating juxtaposition of popular subject and conceptual linguistic approach, Broodthaers appropriates the traditional medium of painting to subvert it from within. The touching heart placed in the central canvas of the present work stands in ironic opposition to the subject matter and the decline of glorified anarchical rebels.

Broodthaers’s wide-reaching oeuvre and strong influence on both artists and curators alike has recently been institutionally acknowledged this year by a celebrated retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid. The present work in particular stands at a pivotal moment in Broodthaers’s career where he appropriated the traditional medium of painting to masterfully subvert it. Among the most elegant of the works that deal with the matter of painting, this series masterfully references his Peintures Littéraires, where the artist used the names of famous French artists and writers as the subject of his works. Similar to these works, Culture Internationale, John Dillinger enters into a realm in which verbal, written, and pictorial language are masterfully combined. Opposed to the predominant avant-garde conception of painting that is primarily defined by visual and spatial devices, Broodthaers turned to the linguistic and cognitive realm that would align his practice with literature and poetry rather than actual painting. By referencing Marcel Duchamp and René Magritte, whose oeuvre postulated a new form of intellectual expression towards linguistic cogency, Broodthaers turned towards avant-garde poetry and in particular the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé. Broodthaers himself declared: “Mallarmé is the origin of contemporary art. He has unconsciously invented modern space” (Marcel Broodthaers cited in: Jean-François Chevrier, ‘To ‘whomever’…,’ in: Exh. Cat., Barcelona, MACBA, Art and Utopia: Restricted Action, 2004, p. 13). Where Mallarmé’s poems proposed to liberate language from the conventions of space and typography, Broodthaers’s paintings from that period similarly reverse the traditional concept of painting. Referencing Mallarmé’s questioning of the relationship between illusion and representation, the present work operates in a field in which the meaning associated with a word is detached from its visual representation, thereby reclaiming linguistic autonomy and innovatively scrutinising the traditional norms of artistic production.