The nine black and white photographs used to create this work were taken at Broodthaers’s request by his wife, Maria Gilissen. Once developed, the photographs were trimmed to various sizes with a guillotine. Broodthaers arrived at the museum with a collection of photographs, from which he made more than one new work. Broodthaers chose the images that constitute this work while at the museum. He then gave detailed instructions as to the production of the work, specifying everything from the arrangement of the images to the weave and texture of the binding around the edges of the work. The photographs are stuck onto a blackboard and are held in place by a strip of sellotape in the center of each one. Though this method of adhesion has resulted in the photographs curling up slightly at the edges, it was Broodthaers’s intention when he made the work that the images should shift slightly over time.

The photographs depict the projection of images of paintings onto the side of packing cases. Five of the photographs depict two painted portraits by the French neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres that are in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Occupying all three places in the center row is an image of Ingres’s painting Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière (1805). These three photographs are nearly identical, having been printed from the same negative. The center and right photographs on the lower row show images of Ingres’s portrait of Louis-François Bertin (1832), a leading French political writer of the nineteenth century. Three of the remaining photographs show the outside of packing crates (with no projections on them), while the photograph in the top left corner depicts the darkened interior of one of the crates. Though these photographs were not taken during a public performance as such, they relate to actions carried out in public by the artist. For example, at the Städticshes Museum in Mönchengladbach in 1971, Broodthaers projected slides and films onto the side of packing cases, including an image of the same painting of Mademoiselle Rivière. For Broodthaers, this act of superimposition functioned partly to evoke the process of radiography, whereby the external skin and interior contents are seen simultaneously. The assumption that the crates contain the works depicted, however, is thrown into question by the upper left image, which depicts the crate’s empty interior.

Typically of Broodthaers, who often recycled his works wholly or in part, these images refer to an earlier project, the Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles (1968). On 27 September 1968, in several rooms on the ground floor of his house at 30, rue de la Pépinière in Brussels, Broodthaers had opened his own museum. This first manifestation of what was to become a long-term artistic project took the form of the 19th Century Section of his ‘museum’. Under this rather grand aegis, Broodthaers displayed the paraphernalia and trappings of a conventional museum, but no actual artworks. The packing cases in Broodthaers’s ‘museum’ were of varying sizes and probably came from the Brussels company Menkes Continental Transport, a specialist art transporter. Stenciled onto the side of them were warning signs typical of art handling, such as ‘FRAGILE’, ‘PICTURE’, and ‘HANDLE WITH CARE’. Clearly visible in the photographs in Mademoiselle Rivière and Monsieur Bertin are fragments of such instructions: ‘KEEP DRY’, ‘PICTURE’ and ‘WITH CARE’.

The arrangement of photographs invites a sequential reading that, moving from top left to bottom right, might suggest the unfolding event of the slide show. However, Broodthaers confirmed that the configuration of the photographs in Mademoiselle Rivière and Monsieur Bertin is arbitrary. Broodthaers placed great emphasis on the processes of chance in creating his works, something which to some extent seems reminiscent of the surrealist belief in ‘objective chance’. In fact, the choice of photographs for Mademoiselle Rivière and Monsieur Bertin appears laden with meaning, even if the arrangement is less premeditated.