Minuit
Brussels: George Houyoux, 1960. First edition. [24] pp. Printed wrappers. One of 225 copies printed. The rare second book by the protean Belgian artist, a collection of poems.
Broodthaers famously renounced his decades as a struggling poet and wrote in the preface to his first exhibition catalogue, in 1964, "For some time, I have been no good at anything. I am 40 years old… Finally the idea of inventing something insincere crossed my mind and I set to work straight away." Despite this ironic dismissal, Broodthaers' poetry continually shadowed his later artistic career. Deeply influenced by Baudelaire and Mallarmé, whose significance remained throughout in his work, his art was inundated with words: printed, written, spoken or photographed. In 1974, he declared himself 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." (Collected Writings, 410.)
See Marcel Broodthaers, The Complete Prints and Books (Ronny Van de Velde, 2012), 28. Of four copies in OCLC, only one listed in the US, at the Getty Research Institute, another copy noted at MOMA. Item #1865
Price: $950.00