Meret Oppenheim

One of the most unusual women of the twentieth century, Meret Oppenheim most famously created the legendary Le Déjeuner en Fourrure, her 1936 assemblage of a tea cup and a fur. But Oppenheim was not just a Surrealist mouthful--though she provided the movement with one of its most recognizable symbols. Like her counterparts Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Man Ray, she used found materials freely in her artworks, often to the point of creating a critical alienation of the viewer from an otherwise familiar object. Her greater oeuvre has often been subsumed by the dominance of the ubiquitous fur cup, a situation which this publication aims to remedy, presenting a career-spanning selection of witty drawings, paintings, objects, collages, poems and designs for "applied artworks"--fantastic clothes, jewelry and furniture. Shortly before her death, Oppenheim and editor Thomas Levy developed the idea of realizing some of her applied artworks; those that were made to appear here through photo documentation. Also included are scholarly essays, an exhibition list, a bibliography and a filmography.

Nine essays that explore key elements of Oppenheim's art and shed new light on defining aspects of her life and career. Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) is far more than just the creator of the iconic fur teacup. In the course of her career, she produced a complex, wide-ranging, and enigmatic body of work that has no parallel in modern art. Like an x-ray beam, this book scans Oppenheim's artistic oeuvre, bringing its variety, playfulness, and poetry to the fore. Instead of simply answering the riddles posed by these intriguing works, it maps out the paths that will lead us to still more clues. Simon Baur is a leading expert in the life and art of Meret Oppenheim. The nine new essays featured in this volume are at once scholarly and easy to read. In them, Baur shares the many fascinating insights and interpretations that he has gleaned from his decades-long engagement with Oppenheim's work. The result is an anthology that combines both biographical and thematic aspects and takes us on an exciting journey into the poetic cosmos of a truly great female artist.

Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) is one of the twentieth century's most important and unconventional artists. Her multifaceted, independent oeuvre includes painting, sculpture, poetry, and design. The publication illuminates her diverse body of work in an international context and demonstrates the remarkable influence this fascinating personality had on later generations of artists, for instance, as a feminist role model.

In 1936, invited by André Breton to contribute to an exhibition of Surrealist objects, Meret Oppenheim decided to act upon a café conversation she had recently had with Pablo Picasso and his then-companion Dora Maar. Commenting on a fur-covered bracelet that Oppenheim had made for the designer Schiaparelli, Picasso remarked that one could cover just about anything in fur, to which Oppenheim had responded, 'Even this cup and saucer.' The resulting sculpture was Object, a teacup, saucer and spoon purchased from a department store and lined with Chinese gazelle fur. In this volume of the MoMA One on One series, an essay by Carolyn Lanchner, a former curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, explores the subversive nature of this sensual yet disturbing work, which simultaneously attracts and repels the viewer, and of the dreamlike world of Surrealism in which Oppenheim worked.

"The female side of Surrealism: in the period from 1930 to the 1960s, women artists from all over the world were involved in the Surrealist movement and created a fantastic universe of images. Some 260 works of painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and film serve to present the extraordinary and imaginative contributions of 36 international avant-garde women artists to one of the seminal art movements of modernism."--Page 4 de la couverture

Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) is one of the most recognized twentieth-century artists: an almost legendary figure able to stand out on a mainly male-dominated Surrealist art scene while developing her own highly personal artistic practice. This catalogue presents her entire career, from the 1930s to her late works. It thus reveals the intense personal and creative network of relationships she nurtured with her older and often already famous peers during her time in Paris: Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Hans Arp and others are also documented in this publication through some of their most significant works. What emerges, above all, is the extent to which the artist influenced, thanks to her personality and allure, the Surrealist vocabulary in which objects turn into fetishes, oneiric and erotic fantasies intermingle, and women are seen as innocent or evil, enveloped in mysterious nature. After the war, Meret Oppenheim conducted her investigations - ranging from figurativism to abstraction, from assemblage to painting - while eluding all attempts at categorization. Her creative freedom and the extraordinary evocative power of her works have made her a key figure for many generations of artists, as can be seen here through parallels with creations by Daniel Spoerri, Birgit J�rgenssen, Robert Gober and Mona Hatoum.

These sixteen illustrated essays present an important revision of surrealism by focusing on the works of women surrealists and their strategies to assert positions as creative subjects within a movement that regarded woman primarily as an object of masculine desire or fear.While the male surrealists attacked aspects of the bourgeois order, they reinforced the traditional patriarchal image of woman. Their emphasis on dreams, automatic writing, and the unconscious reveal some of the least inhibited masculine fantasies. The first resistance to the male surrealists' projection of the female figure arose in the writings and paintings of marginalized woman artists and writers associated with Surrealism. The essays in this collection explore the complexity of these women's works, which simultaneously employ and subvert the dominant discourse of male surrealists. Essays What Do Little Girls Dream Of: The Insurgent Writing of Gis�le Prassinos • Finding What You Are Not Looking For • From D�jeuner en fourrure to Caroline: Meret Oppenheim's Chronicle of Surrealism • Speaking with Forked Tongues: "Male" Discourse in "Female" Surrealism? • Androgyny: Interview with Meret Oppenheim • The Body Subversive: Corporeal Imagery in Carrington, Prassinos, and Mansour • Identity Crises: Joyce Mansour's Narratives • Joyce Mansour and Egyptian Mythology • In the Interim: The Constructivist Surrealism of Kay Sage • The Flight from Passion in Leonora Carrington's Literary Work • Beauty and/Is the Beast: Animal Symbology in the Work of Leonora Carrington, Remedio Varo, and Leonor Fini • Valentine, Andr�, Paul et les autres, or the Surrealization of Valentine Hugo • Refashioning the World to the Image of Female Desire: The Collages of Aube Ell�ou�t • Eileen Agar • Statement by Dorothea Tanning