Musée-Museum is part of Broodthaers’s Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, the fictional museum he developed between 1968 and 1972. Part parody and part protest against what he saw as the inadequacies and problematic nationalism of art institutions at the time, Broodthaers’s museum featured no permanent collection or physical location, but instead took shape as 12 “sections” (including a Figures Section and a Cinema Section) realized through a series of installations planned by the artist. Here, Section of the Nineteenth Century—in which shipping crates and postcards stand in for original artworks—is represented through floor plans. This print was made in 100 impressions and in two variants. The first (numbers one to 60) features three color-postcard additions picturing works by 19th-century French painters Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Gustave Courbet; the second (numbers 61 to 100) includes two postcards showing works by Ingres only.

Visit MoMA.org to view the variant of this work.