Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard: Image (1969)

Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard: Image (1969)
Marcel Broodthaers
Softcover, saddle-stitched, staples. H325 × W25 mm. [32] pages.Edition of 300. Acquired from Dr. A. Sturies, 20 November 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection

The story goes that in 1945 or 1946 René Magritte gave Marcel Broodthaers a copy of Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard: Poème (1914). Twenty-three or twenty-four years later, Broodthaers organized an exhibition in homage to the poem. Entitled Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé: Marcel Broodthaers à la Deblioudebliou/S (“Literary exhibition around Mallarmé at the Deblioudebliou/S”), it presented three versions of an appropriation of the poem. The three versions consist of ten copies numbered I-X on anodized aluminum, ninety copies numbered 1-90 on transparent mechanographic paper (the original edition), and three hundred copies on opaque paper (the catalogue edition).

Invitation to Marcel Broodthaers’ Exposition Littéraire autour de Mallarmé at the Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp, December 1969; image courtesy of MACBA. Deblioudebliou/S puns on a distorted French pronunciation of the letter W and the three initials of the Antwerp gallery Wide White Space.

On Broodthaers’ cover, the word Image occupies the same space as Poème on the cover of the 1914 edition arranged by Mallarmé’s son-in-law. On the title page, however, Image comes first and in type larger than the poem’s title beneath it. The poem’s title is even smaller that Broodthaers’ name. Already this promises to be a bold appropriation of Mallarmé’s poem.

When the poem first appeared in the May 1897 issue of Cosmopolis, Mallarmé reluctantly provided a preface at the editors’ request. So reluctant was he that the preface urges readers not to read it. Broodthaers obliges. He displaces all of Mallarmé’s dismissive text with the poem’s entirety in a justified block of type with the line breaks indicated by slashes. Until the colophon, that will be the only legible text to appear in this homage.

“Le modèle de cette image approximative est l’édition originale du poème ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ de Stéphane Mallarmé, publié en 1914 par la librairie Gallimard.” Books On Books Collection.

Between these two islands of text, Broodthaers offers his “image” of the poem: printer’s leading of the same dimensions as the types in the original edition of the poem. The image is the homage. In light of Magritte’s poster-essay “Les mots et les images” (1929) and its translation and appearance as an accordion-formatted catalogue for the Sidney Janis Gallery’s Magritte show in 1954, Broodthaers could equally have been paying homage to Magritte.

Top: Printer’s leading redacts “UN COUP DE DÉS”. Bottom: The leading redacts “JAMAIS” and the next three lines, which were set in smaller type. Books On Books Collection.

The other two versions were materially even more striking, and with the rest of the elements in play in the Wide White Space Gallery, Broodthaers made an innovative advance for post-Surrealism.

Top: the anodized aluminum edition; image courtesy of Charles Bernstein. Bottom: the translucent edition; image courtesy of MACBA.

As visitors to Broodthaers’ 1969 show perused the three editions, a tape recording of Broodthaers’ reading the poem played in the background. Broodthaers’ Image was not the only homage for Un Coup de Dés on display. Three hanging black shirts, allegedly taken from the Dallas Police Department, bore the full text of the poem transcribed in thin white chalk. With its floor painted black (the poem’s abyss?) and the works on display, the installation at the Wide White Space was also not Broodthaers’ first curation as art.

In 1968, Broodthaers established Le Musée d’art moderne, Département des aigles [The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles]. Through 1972, museum shows occurred in various locations: his Brussels studio, the Städtischer Kunsthalle and a basement room at Burgplatz 12 both in Düsseldorf, at documenta 5 in Kassel, the A379089 alternative art center in Antwerp, and Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne. A 1968 manuscript in the Musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique in Brussels shows sketches of works of homage to Mallarmé that Broodthaers assigned to his museum’s “Literary Section”.

Broodthaers’ multimedia homage would provoke dozens of artists to create works of double-, triple- even quintuple-homage over the following decades into the new century. Among the most prolific of hommageurs, Michalis Pichler mounted Pichler: Exposition Littéraire autour de Mallarmé” in Milan in 2016. There he displayed many of those works of homage alongside his own. Later in 2024 at the Center for Book Art in New York, Pichler formalized Broodthaers’ concept of curation as art form in a show and book entitled Coup de dés (Collection) Books and Ideas after Mallarmé. Two years before, Galerie Michael Werner hosted an exhibition entitled “Footprints of a collector: Reiner Speck. Mallarmé, Broodthaers et les autres” (2 May – 23 July 2022). In addition to outstanding copies of the Image works, the curator Sabine Schiffer and Reiner Speck included Garniture Symbolique (1975), a blue-tinted glossy photo strip with nine photos on glossy paper, showing excerpts and phrases from the poem. Also included was a painting entitled Un coup de dés jamais quand bien même… (oil, gold paint, felt pen on canvas) from 1969, which is owned by Speck and, according to his afterword in the catalogue, has appeared in every exhibition of Broodthaers’ work since. For anyone looking for a description of Broodthaers’ 1969 exhibition, Sam Sackeroff ‘s “Literary Exhibitions” in the Speck catalogue is the gold standard.

The following collections offer more images of Image:

The Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA) (Wayback Machine)

Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (Brussels, BE) (Wayback Machine)

MACBA (Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, ES) (Wayback Machine)

MMK (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, DE)

MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA) (Wayback Machine) “… all three of his variations are represented in MoMA’s collection: one with translucent paper, one with standard paper, and one on individual aluminum plates.”

NGA (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA) (Wayback Machine)

Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN, USA) (Wayback Machine)

A Voyage on the North Sea (1973)

A Voyage on the North Sea (1974)
Marcel Broodthaers
Paperback (English version), Chinese wrapped-back binding. H148 x W178 mm. 38 pages. Edition of 1000. Acquired from Marcus Campbell Art Books, 9 October 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

That over-elaborate and arch admonition to the reader on the inside cover doubles its mystery when it reappears on the last page of the book. The title page’s reappearance on the inside back cover underlines it. If the warning has been ignored the first time, the reader knows that cutting the fore edge folds reveals the page numbers inside, but does its reappearance at the end prompt some doubt and regret? There’s no going back.

Last page and inside back cover.

Alongside a 16mm film with the same title, the book premiered at the headquarters of the Petersburg Press, Portobello Road, London on 28 January 1974. In addition to the 1000 copies, Petersburg Press produced a numbered edition of 100 copies, signed by the artist, and distributed in a box with a copy of the film. Although developed together, the film preceded the book in 1973 and was originally entitled Analyse d’une Peinture. The painting in question is one found by Broodthaers at a Parisian flea market. To produce the film, Broodthaers added his own photographs of yachts at sea in the port of Ostend to stills of the painting and its details. With simple cuts and juxtapositions divided into “Page 1”, “Page 2”, etc., the film proceeds more like a book than a cinematic narrative, but there is no “booby-trap” in the film comparable to the prefatory warning once the book was prepared. The flea-market painting was also placed on display at the premiere.  

To celebrate the peculiarity of the anniversaries of the artist’s birth (28 January 1924), the artist’s death (28 January 1976), and the book-film’s debut screening (28 January 1974), David Platzker organized his Specific Object exhibition Marcel Broodthaers : A Voyage on the North Sea on 28 January 2009. Platzker’s description provides just the right preface to the film and conclusion to this Books On Books Collection entry:

The subject of the exhibition focuses on Marcel Broodthaers’ film and book, both titled A Voyage on the North Sea which were distributed together as part and parcel of the same publishing plot. The ostensibly related subject of both book and film consists mutually of 19th and 20th century nautical images including: 1. photographic reproductions and details of an amateur’s 19th century painting of a fleet of fishing ships and 2. photographs of a contemporary sailboat. Bringing together film, books, ephemera, drawing, and the artist’s original maquette for the book, this specific exhibition sets out to map the local coordinates of A Voyage on the North Sea’s maiden launch on January 28, 1974 at the London offices of Petersburg Press. …

Referring a contemporary audience to the original screening context of Broodthaers’ book-film—itself very much like a reading lesson–this exhibition asks how a contemporary audience might begin to unpack the particular dialectics, obtuse poetics, and critical cargo of Broodthaers’ confounding enterprise. “It is up to the attentive reader,” Broodthaers writes in the preface of the book, “to find out what devilish motive inspired this book’s publication.”

Further Reading

“‘Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira l’Appropriation’— An Online Exhibition“. 1 May 2022. Bookmarking Book Art.

“Buzz Spector“. 12 March 2016. Books On Books Collection. See in particular Between the Sheets.

“Mario Diacono“. 25 July 2026. Books On Books Collection.

Baker, George. 1996. “This Is Not an Advertisement Marcel Broodthaers.” Artforum International.

Marcel Broodthaers : Cinéma. 1997. Barcelona: Fundacio Antoni Tapies.

König, Susanne. 2018. “A work of art as an experimental exhibit. Broodthaers and the Eagle“. Angles: New Perspectives on the Anglophone World. Issue 6.

Krauss, Rosalind E. 1999. “A Voyage on the North Sea” : Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition. London: Thames & Hudson.