Decoration and Rhyme: Reconsidering Marcel Broodthaers's Décor

This thesis interrogates the conceptual implications of décor within Marcel Broodthaers’s oeuvre. Décor begins as an undercurrent in Broodthaers’s early works of 1957–1967 and by the time he staged his late exhibitions [1974–75], had grown into a central political and critical modality within his practice. The thesis discusses connections between his early works and the late film Berlin, oder ein Traum mit Sahne (1975), and examines Un Jardin d’hiver (1974) and Décor, A Conquest by Marcel Broodthaers (1975) and L’Angelus de Daumier (1975). The thesis concludes that Broodthaers’s Décor critically questions the alienating and reifying structures of commodification.