Marcel Broodthaers

The photograph on sensitised canvas of the Mussel Casserole in our collections reflects those objects denied the status of works of art. A trivial reference to Belgian identity and the bourgeois taste for good food, it alludes to what is usually regarded, with a certain contempt, as mass culture. The artist thus deliberately confounds intellectuals and aesthetes. There are technical similarities between this canvas and American Pop Art works, but the banal two-tone colour scheme and the poor quality of the photograph used show that Broodthaers, unlike his colleagues across the Atlantic, denies any artistic value to the object or its image.

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