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 location but instead took shape as twelve "sections" (including a Figures Section and 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 one hundred impressions and in two variants. The first (numbers one to sixty) features three color-postcard additions picturing works by nineteenth-century French painters Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Gustave Courbet; the second (numbers sixty-one to one hundred) includes two postcards showing works by Ingres only.
Gallery label from New to the Print Collection: Matisse to Bourgeois, June 13, 2012–January 7, 2013.