Broodthaers was a Belgian poet and artist who had a lifelong fascination with the work of the Belgian Surrealist, René Magritte. He was particularly interested in those works where Magritte introduced written words to contradict a visual image and made a number of paintings and prints based on this idea. Such works question the relationship between art and the reality it depicts. This is one of a large series of works each consisting of nine panels and referring to various areas of culture.

The title of this work, Paintings, describes not only its medium but also its subject matter. It comprises nine canvases that have been primed with white paint. Each of the canvases bears French words associated with painting, printed in the elegant typographic script in various colors of either oil-based inks or thinned oil paint. There are sixteen different words in total, dispersed over the nine canvases. Together, the words fall roughly into three categories: those concerned with the practical aspects of producing a painting, those that describe the subject of work, and those that refer to art historical concepts. The first group of words includes ‘brosse’ (brush), ‘chassis’ (stretcher), ‘clous’ (nails) and ‘chevalet’ (easel). The second group includes the word ‘figures’ (figures), which appears eleven times in total, along with elements of the human figure: ‘yeux’ (eyes), ‘peau’ (skin), ‘oreilles’ (ears), and ‘cheveux’ (hair). The third set, dealing with artistic method and tradition, includes ‘style’ (style), ‘perspective’ (perspective), and ‘couleur’ (color), as well as the ultimate commercial end of the process, ‘prix’ (price), which appears nine times. The work, which can be literally ‘read’, functions as a structural analysis of painting, translating its constituent parts into language, which is, in turn, presented in paint.

The choice and arrangement of words indicate Broodthaers’s concern with the institution of art history, and with the traditions and tools of painting. The central panel contains just two words, which may suggest the two parallel concerns of the traditional painter: ‘les figures’ (the figures) and ‘le style’ (the style), or content alongside technique. The inclusion, between these two words, of the numerals 1 to 9 may be an allusion to the traditional notion of an ideal composition informed by mathematical geometry, a reference echoed by the inclusion of the word ‘perspective’ on canvases three, six, and seven. This may be read with some level of irony since the canvases do not present any scene or sense of receding space often associated with naturalistic painting.

The inclusion of so many terms that relate to portraiture alludes to the means by which artists had traditionally interacted with bourgeois society. The generic nature of the features may point to a certain level of satire on Broodthaers’s part, conjuring the image of the painter churning out one portrait after another, using a standard toolkit of ‘mix and match’ elements. The large scale of the work and the frequency with which the word ‘figure’ appears (eleven times) conjure up the high traditions of painting historical subjects, exemplified, for example, by Broodthaers’s fellow Belgian Peter Paul Rubens. Broodthaers harnesses the elegance of such traditions through his use of script-style typography. However, he also uses it to undermine traditional artistic conventions. The composition does not convey any form of narrative and the subject of the painting is the painting itself, which ironically is largely printed rather than painted. It is left to the viewer to construct a relationship between its elements, one that will be subject to infinite change. According to Broodthaers, this relationship is deliberately arbitrary, ‘in order to introduce and establish falsehoods in (artistic) reality’. Playing on the tension between artifice and the so-called ‘reality’ of artistic representation, Paintings questions the assumptions made by artists and art historians about pictorial meaning. The art historian Michael Compton has noted that it is the absence of any linear relationship between these verbal, written, and pictorial elements that prevent the assertion of previously assumed facts. By highlighting these fundamental structural faults inherent in painting, Broodthaers undermine the ways in which the viewer interacts with artwork and with the notion of art itself.