From Armand Rassenfosse
to Marcel Broodthaers
Virginie Devillez Fine Art is delighted to present the exhibition From Armand Rassenfoss to Marcel Broodthaers at Galerie Jacques de la Béraudière in Brussels, housed in the former studio of Liège-born painter and illustrator Charles Michel. The historic space provides an ideal setting for a dialogue between artists across generations.
The exhibition will highlight a rare work by Marcel Broodthaers (1924–1976), Culture Internationale, Lucky Luciano (1974), as a conceptual and literary take on Pop artists’ fascination with gangsters — particularly Andy Warhol and his Most Wanted Men series. The work also recalls Broodthaers’s “Peintures Littéraires” (Literary Paintings), in which the names of celebrated French writers become the very subject of the work.
Marcel Broodthaers had a deep interest in literature, having begun his career as a poet, writer, and critic. Exploring the labyrinth between word, image, and thought, he continuously deconstructed the texts of his favorite authors — Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, and Isidore Ducasse, known as Lautréamont — and re-presented them within a shifted, unconventional space.
His work is therefore exhibited in dialogue with Armand Rassenfosse (1862–1934), whose significant body of illustrations for 19th-century authors includes, most notably, Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques.
Works by Théophile Alexandre Steinlen (1859–1923), the committed anarchist artist and illustrator, will also be shown alongside the conceptual and minimalist practices of Marcel Broodthaers, stanley brouwn (1935–2017), and John McCracken (1934–2011).
