Like many of Broodthaers’s early sculptures, I Return to Matter, I Rediscover the Tradition of the Primitives, Painting with Egg, Painting with Egg uses discarded eggshells as both subject and medium, a dual function reinforced by the work’s tautological title. The work comprises a varnished, wooden cigar box filled with broken eggshells. Some of the eggs are painted in black, red, and yellow (the colors of the Belgian flag), using a paintbrush or possibly an aerosol spray, and some also have glue on them, though they are not fixed in place. The work was produced in 1966, early in Broodthaers’s career as a visual artist. Prior to this, he had been a writer and poet. Partially from financial necessity, he obtained the materials for many of his sculptures during this period from friends and local businesses; the eggshells in this work probably came originally from the local Brussels restaurant La Boue, whose cook, Madame Fernande, was the only person who could consistently break them just as Broodthaers wanted. The hinged box, made from a commercial hardwood (possibly abura) is typical of those found in most tobacconist’s shops, though its exact source is unrecorded.

On the inside of the box’s lid, the artist pasted private view announcements that he designed for his exhibition at Galerie Cogeime in Brussels in 1966, with which this work shares its name. The eggshells that appear in this work had initially been incorporated into other works intended for the same exhibition, but were removed or replaced prior to the opening; such a strategy of recycling all or part of his works is typical of Broodthaers’s working methods. It is not certain whether the box itself was included in the exhibition. Broodthaers created this new work while setting up the exhibition and presented it to Madame Cogeime, the wife of the gallery owner, who passed it to the Brussels-based Galerie Isy Brachot sometime in the 1970s. Many of the works in the Galerie Cogeime exhibition used eggshells, and on the day of the opening Broodthaers set up tables outside the gallery on which he piled cages of chickens, partly to emphasize his use of eggs as a medium for his work.

Broodthaers used two entire printed private view announcements in this work, and at least part of a third one also. Only one is visible in its entirety, while above it a section of the second may be partially seen. In another tautological gesture, Broodthaers made the exhibition the physical makeup of his work as well as its subject matter. Each announcement consists of a gummed printed sheet that is divided into nine rectangular sections by means of perforations. Each of the sections has a border, giving the appearance of nine separate miniature pages. The nature of the invitation, rather like a postage stamp, suggests that the exhibition's visitors were intended to use it in a similar way to this, applying it to any surface to which it would stick. Though the Galerie Cogeime was an established venue, the invitation resembles underground advertising such as fly posters. Broodthaers’s use of private view cards in this work reflects his interest in the systems and trappings of art exhibitions and the art world, a concern that would inform much of his work. Of the nine sections, three (upper left, middle right, and bottom center) contain a photograph of eight eggshells against a darker background. The image may depict a part of one of Broodthaers’s other works from the period 1965 to1966, most probably one that he had prepared in anticipation of the Galerie Cogeime exhibition. It is reminiscent of several works of these two years when Broodthaers frequently created works by placing eggshells and their fragments on canvas or board as well as on pieces of furniture such as tables or cabinets. Broodthaers often added paint to these accumulations of shells, though the contrast between the dark ground and the lighter shapes of the eggshells in these photographs suggests that these were only lightly colored, if at all. Rather, in this instance, it is the printing process that has added color to the eggs: the photographs are printed in the colors black, red, and yellow respectively, echoing the painted eggshells below them. The use of the three colors from the Belgian flag recalls such works as Broodthaers’s Triptych (1966), created in the same year as I Return to Matter…. This work consists of three canvases painted in black, yellow, and red and covered in rows of eggshells, arranged in the same formation as the Belgian flag. Such references to national identity offer a reminder of the peculiarly Belgian concerns of Broodthaers’s artistic project, one that culminated in a body of work in which the symbol of the mussel, the dual languages of French and Flemish, and the colors of the Belgian flag frequently reoccur.

The other six sections of the printed sheet are textual; three refer to the work and its creator, and three to the gallery and exhibition where it was first exhibited. The bottom-left section of the exhibition invitation contains Broodthaers’s initials ‘M.B.’ in a handwritten script, repeated twelve times, in three rows of four sets. Although apparently written by hand, the signature of the artist is multiplied in print. In a typically subversive gesture, Broodthaers did not reserve his signature for the work of art, but repeated it on the invitation, allowing all those who received a card the chance to own it. Ironically, by the time it reappears here, having been returned to the artwork, its proliferation has undermined its status as a unique sign of authorship.

In 1994, I Return to Matter, I Rediscover the Tradition of the Primitives, Painting with Egg, Painting with Egg was included in the exhibition Worlds in a Box at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, although it did not tour to the show’s other venues. This exhibition presented it within an artistic trajectory rooted in the work of Marcel Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters and alongside the work of artists such as Joseph Cornell and those associated with the Fluxus movement. Such a context highlighted the work’s debt to surrealism, including and especially the boxed collections of artifacts assembled and presented by the writer André Breton. However, Broodthaers’s use of the cigar box may also be viewed in the context of his choice of other materials in this period, many of which display a common interest in the form of the empty shell as an empty container, for example, mussel shells, jars and cooking pots (see, for example, Casserole and Closed Mussels, 1964). In I Return to Matter... the empty space of the shell is echoed by the empty cigar box, itself a discarded container. These forms evoke that which is now gone: the egg yolk and whoever has eaten it, the cigars, and whoever has smoked them. The relationships between the various components of his works were central to Broodthaers’s interpretation of his sculpture. In an interview in 1974, he described those works that contained egg and mussel shells in these terms: ‘the subject is that of the relationship established between the shells and the object that supports them.’ This interest in a direct relation between objects is in contrast to the surrealists’ juxtaposition of incongruous objects, distancing Broodthaers’s work from claims to a straightforward surrealist legacy.