A Swiss painter, sculptor, and photographer who came to Paris in the 1930s, Meret Oppenheim was regarded in artistic circles as the ideal Surrealist woman--a so-called femme-enfant whose lack of inhibitions and subversive behavior made her as much an object of desire and a muse as she was an artist in her own right. … (read more)

A Swiss painter, sculptor, and photographer who came to Paris in the 1930s, Meret Oppenheim was regarded in artistic circles as the ideal Surrealist woman--a so-called femme-enfant whose lack of inhibitions and subversive behavior made her as much an object of desire and a muse as she was an artist in her own right.

First exhibiting with the other Surrealists at the Salon des Surindépendants in Paris of 1933, Oppenheim is today best known for her sculpture Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure) (1936), in which she covered a cup and saucer in fur. The result of a casual conversation with Picasso in which he noted that "anything" could be covered in fur, the work sabotages the utility of the items while imbuing them with an eroticism that both repels and attracts.

Oppenheim’s juxtaposition of unusual objects and materials mines the subconscious world of dreams, from which she drew much of her inspiration. (Her father, a doctor, had been a passionate adherent of Jung's philosophy.) Her later body of work consists of a varied output ranging from film scripts and poetry to costumes and masks. Today Oppenheim's legacy rests mainly on Object, now a cornerpiece of MoMA's collection, and her mythic status as a key figure in the male-dominated Surrealist movement.

Click here to learn more about Meret Oppenheim from The Museum of Modern Art

Click here to read Meret Oppenheim: An Enormously Tiny Bit of A Lot by Ruth Hafen for Credit Suisse eMagazine about The Museum of Fine Arts Berne 2006 Oppenheim retrospective

Listen to artist Jenny Holzer explain Oppenheim's Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure) [via gussie54]:

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