Meret Oppenheim

Meret Oppenheim is one of the most famous artists ever, she has her place in the same league as Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Marina Abramović or Camille Claudel. Her famous fur cup Le déjeuner en fourrure is the icon of surrealism, the photos of Man Ray, in which she stands naked and with a blackened upper arm at the printing press, are cult. Meret Oppenheim has fascinated people all over the world and across all social backgrounds for generations. One gets the impression that she serves numerous wishes, dreams and fantasies. She also acts as an ideal projection screen, because her ideas and thoughts revolutionised the image of the artist - especially the female artist - and helped numerous contemporary and future female artists to gain a new self-confidence.

That this celebrity has come about is anything but self-evident. It is true that Meret Oppenheim grew up in a bourgeois milieu that responded to her artistic interests early on and took her explicit wish to become an artist seriously. [...] When her father gave her the choice of training as an artist in Paris or Munich, Meret Oppenheim decided on Paris. It took some time before she found her way into the artistic circles there, and in the beginning she often spoke of lonely moments. Then everything seems to happen rather quickly. [...] Meret Oppenheim was invited to exhibitions, developed her own ideas, was inspired by other artists and their work and found her artistic expression in these few years until the outbreak of the Second World War. During this time, the unconscious is booming among her surrealist friends, and she too does not consciously set the course. But by the time she returns to Switzerland, she has created iconic works such as Le déjeuner en fourrure (the legendary fur cup), Ma gouvernante - my nurse - my nanny, Steinfrau and the Table with bird feet - works that will help her make her international breakthrough, that will stay with her for a lifetime and that she would at times come to curse.

During the war, Meret Oppenheim decides to attend the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) in Basel in order to deepen the skills she has acquired in her autodidactic studies. At the same time, she experiences a long crisis during the first few years, in which she creates much, but also destroys much as well. Later she will say that during that time she felt the burden of centuries of oppression against women and had to free herself from it. The fact remains that even in these years of crisis, many important works are created which shape her art: Works that deal with political, social and cultural aspects.

After a sleepless night in 1954 the crisis abruptly ended and Meret Oppenheim rented a studio again. At the end of the 1950s she freed herself from surrealism, but without breaking off contact with the protagonists of that time - the friendships still remained. As an artist, however, she reoriented herself, although the subconscious always remained of central importance to her. She, who said herself that freedom is not given to you, that you have to take it, frees herself from numerous duties and constraints, lives as a woman and as an artist according to her own ideas and realises in her last 25 years a dense and exciting body of work, which is often (mis)understood as a pale continuation of her early works. Pictures and objects such as The Secret of Vegetation (1972), Pond in a Garden (1975), Termite Queen or the fountain on Bern's Waisenhausplatz in 1983 have the same iconic significance in her œuvre as the fur cup or Man Ray's photograph. The only difference is that art history and the art market have so far paid too little attention to her late work [...].

But the iconic lies elsewhere in Meret Oppenheim's later years as well: in herself. She became a role model for young artists and, for her part, never missed an opportunity to support young artists. This was also the case in her much-noticed acceptance speech for the Basel Art Prize in 1975, which she dedicated to young artists and especially to female artists. [...]

The unconscious, dream, reality, freedom, independence, beauty, sadness - terms that reoccur in Meret Oppenheim's life and work. Although this work appears to be easy to grasp and reasonably logical at first glance, it is rather very complex, associative, poetic and multi-layered when truly concentrated on. The fur cup is also symptomatic of this: it oscillates between temptation and aversion, like the entire work and also the person of Meret Oppenheim. One is either fascinated by her work or perceives it as marginal, there is not much left between these two poles. But still she is not understood by many [...].

Excerpt (shortened) from:
Baur, Simon; Fluri, Christian: Pelzige Schlangelinien durch das Unbewusste. Zu Meret Oppenheim. Eine Einführung, in: Meret Oppenheim. Eine Einführung, Baur; Fluri (Ed.), Christoph Merian Verlag, Basel 2013.