Décors. Salle Verte. The Entry to the Exhibition

In 1974, Broodthaers presented his first  idea of décor, with palm trees, garden chairs, display cases, nineteenth-century prints of animals, and a monitor showing the space and the visitors in it in real time at Palais de Beaux-Arts in Brussels. He named the work Winter Garden and in his artist’s book, produced for the show, referred to it as to a "décor." This was followed by many exhibitions across Europe, where Broodthaers would show more than one décor at a time. "I attempted to articulate different objects and paintings realized at various dates between 1964 and this year to form rooms in a spirit of décor. A décor would normally be used for a piece of theatre…Which is to say, restore the object to its real function and not transform an object into a work of art." Filling exhibition spaces with functional objects like chairs and shelves and decorating them with framed prints, Broodthaers confronted modernist ideology, which feared and rejected functionality, decoration and theatricality, and which chose to exhibit art in the minimalist white cube where nothing distracts visitors from experiencing art.

(Salle Verte)

Salle Verte — or "green room" — is a variation on Winter Garden presented in Brussels in 1974. Speaking about Winter Garden, curator Cathleen Chaffee explains that "Broodthaers described its atmosphere and the notion of comfort it embodied as ideals specific to the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century. Of course, for Broodthaers the nineteenth-century winter garden or palm court was far from a neutral decorative reference. Its predecessor was the eighteenth-century glass-clad Wunderkammern, where nobles could gather and study plant and occasionally animal specimens, often the spoils of colonialism. By the 1840s, with the decline of Europe’s nobility, these collections were largely deprivatized, transferred to the public trust, and turned into public palm courts and tea gardens that became extremely fashionable. Well into the twentieth century, cultivated palm trees could be found decorating Paris salons as well as galleries and museums in order to evoke the previous century’s spaces of public reverie and to soften the shock of new art. In Broodthaers’ hands these familiar spaces became uncanny, almost startling in their anachronism; they recalled the palm court’s historic ties to colonialism and conquest, the origins of public museums in private collections, and the domestication of public space." Unlike Broodthaers’s winter garden, the green room had a window that let in the bright light from the outside. His widow and estate manager Maria Gilissen says that it was important to him to show the connections between the interior and the exterior. Broodthaers also added two taxidermied snakes and a desk that could not be used because of mussel shells plastered to its top.

(The Entry to the Exhibition)

In the central staircase, which leads to the exhibition floor, you will find the work that is appropriately titled The Entry to the Exhibition. This is an extravagant decor with high palm trees . The Entry to the Exhibition welcomed visitors at Broodthaers’s exhibition Éloge du sujet (In praise of the subject) at Kunstmuseum Basel in 1974. At the end of 1974, Broodthaers opened three important exhibitions that closed, according to his request, on the same day. These were Catalogue – Catalogus, a major retrospective at Palais de Beaux-Arts in Brussels; Don’t Say I Didn’t Say So—The Parrot at White Wide Space in Antwerp and In Praise of The Subject in Basel. If in Brussels he was mostly showing his works made from 1963 to 1968, including many objects, the exhibition in Basel contained films and other works produced from 1968 to 1972. The Entry to the Exhibition was an ornamental framework for the display of photographs and prints.