Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard. Image [A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance. Image]

Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp|Stéphane Mallarmé|Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne|Vereman, Antwerp|Marcel Broodthaers

1969 · Artist's book · Drawings and Prints

In 1963, Broodthaers abandoned poetry to focus on visual art. In this work, he makes reference to this transition by revealing the graphic, nearly abstract quality of the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s canonical poem of the same title. On the cover, Broodthaers exchanged the names of Mallarmé and his publisher with his own and those of his galleries, and the word poéme with image. Inside, multiple black bars, whose dimensions and arrangement correspond exactly to that of Mallarmé’s text in the 1914 edition, are repeated on each page, turning writing into image.

Artist

Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp|Stéphane Mallarmé|Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne|Vereman, Antwerp|Marcel Broodthaers

Date

1969

Medium

Artist's book

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Purchase, Bertha and Isaac Liberman Foundation Gift, in memory of Jeffrey P. Klein, 2015