NEW YORK, NY.- The Museum of Modern Art announces Marcel Broodthaers, the artist’s first museum retrospective in New York, from February 14 to May 15, 2016. Bringing together some 200 works in multiple mediums, the exhibition explores the artist’s critical if underrecognized place in the history of 20th-century art. Marcel Broodthaers is organized by MoMA and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS) in Madrid, in close consultation with the artist’s Estate in Brussels. It is organized by Christophe Cherix, The Robert Lehman Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints at MoMA, and Manuel Borja-Villel, Director of MNCARS, with Francesca Wilmott, Curatorial Assistant, MoMA. The exhibition will travel to MNCARS in October 2016 and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (KNW), Düsseldorf, in early 2017.

Marcel Broodthaers’s (Belgian, 1924–1976) extraordinary output across mediums placed him at the center of international activity during the transformative decades of the 1960s and 1970s. Setting a precedent for what we call installation art today, his work has had a profound influence on a broad range of contemporary artists, and he remains vitally relevant to cultural discourse at large. Throughout his career, from early objects variously made of mussels, eggshells, and books of his own poetry; to his most ambitious project, the Musée d’Art Moderne. Département des Aigles; and the retrospective Décors, made at the end of his life, Broodthaers occupied a unique position, often operating as both innovator and commentator. The exhibition will consider the artist with these lasting contributions in mind.

Beginning with some of the lesser-known moments in the artist’s career, Marcel Broodthaers will explore early photographs, poetry, and films, as well as the first objects that marked Broodthaers’s transition to the visual arts. Attention will be given to the issues of reproduction, circulation, and repetition of images that Broodthaers investigated in the mid-1960s, in parallel to the developments of Nouveau Réalisme, Pop, and Conceptual art. In the late 1960s, Broodthaers staged several exhibitions that engaged his literary past through direct dialogue— both verbal and visual—with Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695) and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842– 1898), two authors whose work held particular significance to the artist. Objects featured in Le Corbeau et le Renard (Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp, 1968) and Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé: Marcel Broodthaers à la Debliou-debliou/S (Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp, 1969) will again be brought together to examine this key moment in Broodthaers’s development.

A significant area of focus will be Broodthaers’s creation of the Musée d’Art Moderne. Département des Aigles and the works central to its 12 sections. The exhibition will also explore Broodthaers’s renewed interest in painting and his preoccupation with social and political concerns during the early 1970s. The exhibition will conclude by examining the retrospective displays that Broodthaers coordinated of his own work, and the various Décors that he produced during his last years. Drawing on the expertise of co-organizer Manuel Borja-Villel (curator of Marcel Broodthaers Cinéma, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1997), the artist’s films will be well represented throughout the exhibition, integrated into his oeuvre as the artist intended. Independent film screening nights are also planned in conjunction with the Department of Film.

In 2011, MoMA acquired the Herman and Nicole Daled Collection, one of the defining collections of American and European Conceptual art of the late 1960s and 1970s. The collection came to MoMA with an unparalleled grouping of over 60 works by Broodthaers and a rich archive of rarely seen ephemera and photographs, making New York a new center for the presentation and study of the artist’s work.

A comprehensive exhibition catalogue of approximately 350 pages will include original essays by the exhibition’s organizers Christophe Cherix and Manuel Borja-Villel, along with a host of major scholars, including Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Thierry de Duve, and Jean-François Chevrier. It will also include newly commissioned translations of many of Broodthaers’s texts. Chapters will be organized chronologically and thematically, and will include plates sections with introductory texts by several contributors; an exhibition history and bibliography will round out the volume.