The Program in Visual Arts in Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts presents Marcel Broodthaers and America, a two-day symposium presented on the occasion of influential Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers’ Centenary and examining his ideas about the United States. The symposium, organized by Professor of Visual Arts Joe Scanlan, is October 9 and 10 at the University’s East Pyne Hall and Chancellor Green, and is free and open to the public; no registration is required. East Pyne and Chancellor Green are accessible venues. Guests in need of access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.
Marcel Broodthaers (1924–1976) worked primarily as a poet until the age of 40, when he turned to the visual arts. Over the next 12 years, his work retained a poetic quality and a sense of humor by inventing ways to give material form to language while working across mediums—poetry, sculpture, painting, artist’s books, printmaking, and film. From 1968 to 1972, he operated the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles), a traveling museum dedicated not to his work as an artist but to the role of the institution itself and the function of art in society.
Scanlan notes that for all the banal and erudite references used by Broodthaers—from mussel shells and industrial signage to Aesop and Mallarmé—America is the one oft-cited reference in his writing and artworks that he never experienced firsthand. This lack of empirical knowledge lends an element of fantasy to Broodthaers’ idea of America, and these speculations are the likely reason why it remains one of the least examined aspects of his work. Whatever the case may be, Broodthaers must have based his idea of America on something, states Scanlan. This symposium promises to critically examine, both explicitly and obliquely, new theories on what that something might be.
Design by Tracy Patterson
The symposium begins at 4:30 p.m. on October 9 in East Pyne with the lecture “Marcel Broodthaers: Painting, Entertainment, and an Unknown Film” by Carolin Meister. She is a Princeton Humanities Council Short-term Belknap Fellow for 2024-25 and holds the chair of art history at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, where she served as vice rector from 2017 to 2023. A reception follows the lecture at 6 p.m.
October 10 will start with a lecture at 11 a.m. in East Pyne Hall by Hannah Bruckmüller on “Marcel Broodthaers’ Father Figures.” Bruckmüller is an assistant professor of art history at the New Design University in St. Pölten, Austria. Her research focuses on intersections between art, literature, and publication practices, combining underrepresented archival material, critical historiography, and feminist thought. Respondent to the lecture is Simon Wu, Princeton Class of 2017, a writer, and a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University. His first book, a collection of essays titled Dancing on My Own, was published in June.
Following lunch, a roundtable discussion will take place at 1 p.m. in Chancellor Green with Sam Shapiro, Margaux van Uytvanck, and Stefaan Vervoort, moderated by Scanlan. Shapiro, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University and a curatorial research assistant at the Princeton University Art Museum, will speak on “An Obedient Material”: Marcel Broodthaers and American Art Museums in the 1970s.” His dissertation is titled “Confrontation and Collaboration: American Artists and Museums in the 1970s.” Next, Margaux Van Uytvank will present “Marcel Broodthaers and Jean Toche: Notes on a Transatlantic Friendship.” Van Uytvanck holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her doctoral research focused on Broodthaers’ professional networks in Brussels. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at New York University and a fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation. Lastly, Stefaan Vervoort will discuss “Marcel Broodthaers, Journalist.” Vervoort is a postdoctoral researcher and founding member of the research group KB45 (Art in Belgium Since 1945) at the Department of Art History, Musicology and Theatre Studies at Ghent University. He is curator of the research exhibition Marcel Broodthaers – The Architect is Absent at CIVA, Brussels (2025), and author of the synonymous book forthcoming from Sternberg Press.
The symposium will conclude with two keynote addresses beginning at 3 p.m. in East Pyne Hall. Trevor Stark, associate professor of art history in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Calgary, will present “The Object of a Prohibition”: Marcel Broodthaers at the Poem’s End.” Stark is the author of Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language After Mallarmé (MIT Press/October Books, 2020). Raf Wollaert, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Antwerp and a Fulbright scholar, will present “Voyage Extraordinaire: Marcel Broodthaers in New York.” Since 2019, Wollaert has coedited the LP edition Marcel Broodthaers: La Lumière Manifeste and organized an international symposium on Broodthaers’ films. Marcel Broodthaers and Film: A Second on Eternity, a collection of essays co-edited with Stephen Jacobs, will be released later this fall.
Scanlan, who joined the Princeton faculty in 2009, is an artist whose work takes multiple forms, from sculpture and design to publications and fictional personae. He is the founding director of the Broodthaers Society of America, a gallery and archive dedicated to examining the life and work of Marcel Broodthaers within the context of the United States. Scanlan served at the director of the Visual Arts Program from 2009–2017.
Marcel Broodthaers and America is the centerpiece of Scanlan’s fall course, “Haptic Lab,” which was made possible by Princeton’s 250th Anniversary Fund for Innovative Undergraduate Education. The symposium has been organized in collaboration with the Broodthaers Society of America, New York, and Kunst in België sinds 1945 (Art in Belgium since 1945), a multidisciplinary research group at Ghent University. It is made possible with support from Princeton’s Humanities Council, the University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Department of Art & Archaeology, and the Lewis Center.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the symposium, the Program in Visual Arts, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.
