Meret Oppenheim

Meret Oppenheim (born October 6, 1913, Berlin, Germany—died November 15, 1985, Basel, Switzerland) was a German-born Swiss artist whose Object (1936), a fur-covered teacup, saucer, and spoon, became an emblem of the Surrealist movement. The piece, created when Oppenheim was just 23 years old, became so famous that it overshadowed the rest of her career.

Oppenheim’s father was German and Jewish and her mother was Swiss. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, the family moved from Germany to Switzerland. Oppenheim was encouraged by her father and by her maternal grandmother, author and illustrator Lisa Wenger-Ruutz, to pursue art. Thus, in 1929 she began art studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel (through 1930). She then moved to Paris and briefly attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in 1932.

Being in Paris offered Oppenheim the opportunity to connect with leading avant-garde artists, which, more than schooling, gave her entrée into the art world. In 1933 she met Alberto Giacometti, Man Ray, André Breton, and Jean (Hans) Arp. Oppenheim was quickly absorbed into the Surrealist circle and exhibited three paintings at the Salon des Surindépendants in Paris in 1933. Soon after meeting Man Ray, she became his muse and modeled for images such as Érotique Voilée (1933; “Erotic Veiled”), in which she appeared nude behind a large printing-press wheel, her left forearm and hand covered in black ink and held against her forehead. The image was published in the Surrealist movement’s journal, Minotaure, in 1934. That year she also began a romantic relationship with artist Max Ernst, which lasted just a year. In 1935 Oppenheim participated in international Surrealist exhibitions in Copenhagen and Tenerife, Canary Islands, and then a year later in London and New York.

During the 1930s Oppenheim created assemblages of everyday items, many of which evoked eroticism, such as My Nurse (1936), a pair of women’s high-heeled shoes trussed together like a game fowl, with paper frills (crowns) on the heels, and placed sole-side up on a platter. In 1936 she also created her most famous work of art. After talking casually with Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar in a Paris café about all the mundane things she could cover in fur and turn into art—like the bracelet she had made and was wearing at the time—Oppenheim selected a teacup, saucer, and spoon to cover in Chinese gazelle fur. The result, Object, was part of the first Surrealist exhibition held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism,” curated by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., in 1936, and it became an overnight art world sensation. MoMA then acquired Object, the museum’s first acquisition (in the seven years since its founding) of art made by a woman. Breton later named the assemblage Le Déjeuner en fourrure (“Luncheon in Fur”), in a nod to Edouard Manet’s iconic painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863; “Luncheon on the Grass”) and Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s erotic novella Venus en fourrures (1870; original title Venus im Pelz; “Venus in Furs”). Reaping the rewards of her newfound fame, Oppenheim had her first solo exhibition in 1936 at Galerie Marguerite Schulthess in Basel.

In 1937 Oppenheim returned to Basel and enrolled in vocational school for two years to study art conservation and restoration, skills she planned to use to earn a living. Overwhelmed by the sensation caused by Object, Oppenheim retreated from the Surrealists. Also frustrated and fearful of the constraints that her early success would put on her developing artistic career, she sank into a deep depression and creative crisis that lasted nearly two decades.

By her own account, she “recovered [her] pleasure in making art very suddenly in late 1954” and rented her own studio in Bern, Switzerland. During that period she also began writing and branching out into other forms of creative production. She created costumes for a production by Daniel Spoerri of Picasso’s play Le Désir attrapé par la queue (1956; Desire Caught by the Tail). In 1959 she created a performance piece for a group of close friends in Bern: Spring Feast (“Frühlingsfest”), an elaborate banquet that Oppenheim served (without silverware) on the body of a nude woman laid out on a long table. Breton asked her to reproduce the piece for the Exposition inteRnatiOnale du Surréalisme (EROS) in Paris (1959–60). Though she did participate, she was not pleased when her work was criticized for objectifying women, as her intention had been to reflect the spring abundance offered from Mother Earth. She never exhibited with the Surrealists again.

In 1967 Oppenheim was recognized with a large retrospective in Stockholm. Her work was further revived in the 1970s by feminist scholars seeking to reintroduce to art history forgotten women artists. In 1975 she won the Art Award from the city of Basel and in 1982 the Grand Art Prize from the city of Berlin. Over the course of her life, Oppenheim created jewelry, sculpture, paintings, furniture, performance art, and poetry. She also designed several public and private fountains in her later years. The controversial tall stone fountain she designed for a public square in Bern (1983), which trickles water and grows algae and moss, was seen initially as an eyesore by the city’s residents. Shows in the late 20th and early 21st centuries—including retrospectives in New York City (1996; Guggenheim Museum), Bern (2006; Kunstmuseum), and Berlin (2013; Martin-Gropius-Bau) as well as the traveling retrospective “Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition” (2021–23)—portrayed her not as the Surrealist one-hit wonder that she had become in the 1930s but as a multifaceted artist with a varied and inspired body of work.