Méret Oppenheim

Méret Oppenheim created the definitive ‘Surrealist object’ in 1936. Her fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon made a sensational debut at André Breton’s exhibition at the Galerie Charles Ratton. This work immediately captured the attention of Alfred H. Barr the director of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, who acquired and included Object in MoMA’s Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition that same year.

At the time of the MoMA acquisition, Méret Oppenheim was barely 23. Born in 1913 in Berlin, Oppenheim enjoyed an enlightened background growing up in Switzerland. Self-assured of creative destiny, she moved to Paris in 1932, befriending fellow Swiss artists Jean Arp and Alberto Giacometti, who introduced her to their circle and encouraged her to create her first Surrealist work. Exhibiting with the Surrealist group at the 1933 Salon des Surindépendants, she was feted as the embodiment of the Surrealist woman, spontaneous in her access to the realms of the dream and the subconscious.

Oppenheim posed naked with androgynous indifference for Man Ray’s Erotique Voilée, published in Breton’s Minotaure 5 in 1934. She painted, drew, wrote poetry, experimented with materials and participated enthusiastically in Surrealist meetings. She designed jewellery for Schiaparelli, and costumes for the ballet.

Her first one-woman show followed swiftly in 1936, and featured an introduction penned by Max Ernst. Her work was exhibited alongside that of Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning and Louise Nevelson in Peggy Guggenheim’s ground-breaking Exhibition by 31 Women in New York in 1943. Her first lifetime retrospective was held at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in 1967. Between 2021 and 2023, her first transatlantic retrospective toured the Kunstmuseum Bern, The Menil Collection, Houston and MoMA, New York. From the vantage of retrospection as a pioneering woman artist, Oppenheim herself saw any such gender distinction as superfluous to the value of her expressive argument.

Méret Oppenheim died in Basel, Switzerland, in 1985. Her legacy is one of innovation and imagination. In 2024 Christie’s sold Oppenheim’s Tisch mit Vogelfüssen (1939) for £529,200, setting a world auction record for the artist.