Citron-Citroen is based on a poster advertising the coastal activities of fishing and collecting shellfish, indicated by the subtitle ‘Réclame pour la Mer du Nord’ (Advertisement for the North Sea), handwritten in the upper left corner of the work. The poster shows two scenes: the upper image depicts fishing nets anchored to the seashore where a figure walks on the beach; the lower image shows a man and two women scraping mussel shells off rocks and wooden groins. Below each scene are illustrations of fish and shellfish. The attire of the figures depicted, and the style of the ships on the horizons, indicate that this is a vintage poster, possibly dating from the nineteenth century, or at least that it uses old-fashioned imagery. Broodthaers used the image of the entire poster to create his editioned screenprint, retaining the signs of wear and tear at its corners, and adding a white border around it. The riveted holes that allowed the poster to be fixed to the wall are also visible in the print, though rendered useless by being transferred into a printed image. Citron-Citroen is one of several works that Broodthaers made using found imagery such as vintage posters and postcards (see, for example, Dear Little Sister, 1972).

The use of discarded everyday materials was a strategy that had initially sprung from financial necessity, but one that became central to Broodthaers’s artistic project, a practice that bore the legacy of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘assisted readymades’. The use of a found image also calls into question the extent to which Broodthaers might claim authorship of the work, a strategy reminiscent not only of Duchamp but of the wider surrealist movement, where appropriation, as well as collective and automatic methods, was harnessed to suppress authorial identity.

As with other prints by Broodthaers – such as The Farm Animals (1974) – there is a didactic element to this image. The two scenes are arranged in a simple frieze-like way, so that their subjects may be clearly identified. The images of the fish and shellfish depicted separately from the main narratives, take on the status of diagrams or specimens, removed from their natural habitat for classification or study purposes.

The list of names not only offers a key to the species illustrated but also introduces an element of wordplay, centering on linguistic difference and similarity, that informs much of Broodthaers’s work A black strip at the bottom of the page, added by the artist, bears the title of the work, also in French and Flemish, in bold lemon yellow letters: Citron – Citroen (Lemon – Lemon). Though at first, the title may appear incongruous, it in fact bears a direct relationship to the fish that are illustrated above, a slice of lemon being the traditional garnish with fish.

References to fish, fishing, and the North Sea are frequent in Broodthaers’s oeuvre but the activities and objects depicted in Citron-Citroen also carry an explicit cultural meaning. The original poster is an advertisement for the North Sea, which meets the north-east coast of Broodthaers’s native Belgium. The mussel in particular is traditionally regarded as a Belgian national dish. Broodthaers had used mussel shells in a number of his early sculptures, such as Casserole and Closed Mussels (1964). His frequent use of mussels and fish also recalls the traditional representation of food, in particular shellfish, in Flemish still life and genre scenes of the seventeenth century. Broodthaers’s decision to use a vintage poster that depicts traditional occupations may express a sense of nostalgia for past centuries and a way of life untroubled by modern mechanization and the politics of the art world to which he felt subjected.