The story behind Object, the fur-shrouded teacup, spoon, and saucer for which Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) is best known, goes like this: In 1936, Oppenheim met Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar for a meal in Paris, turning up to the Café de Flore in a bracelet she’d covered in ocelot. (In 1935, when money from her parents—who were then fleeing Nazi Germany—stopped coming in, Oppenheim began designing jewelry to support herself.) Her companions complimented it, moving Oppenheim to wonder what else she might coat in fur, and the result was Object, which she sold to the Museum of Modern Art a decade later.
That and nearly 200 other beguiling creations form “Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition,” a survey opening at MoMA this fall after stops at the Kunstmuseum Bern and the Menil Collection in Houston. Spanning paintings, drawings, sculptures, assemblages, poetry, and works on paper, the show makes a persuasive case for Oppenheim as more than just a Surrealist wunderkind—although Object set a kind of precedent. “That object provides a key to threads that run throughout her tremendously varied body of work,” says Anne Umland, the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA. “She is interested in works that make domesticity walk on the wild side.”
She also had a wonderful sense of humor, a sharp eye for color, and the good sense not to fade into obscurity after her early success. “At our opening, I asked who had met Meret at least once, and one third of the audience raised their hand,” says Nina Zimmer, director of the Kunstmuseum Bern. “Every 15-year-old who had the chance to shake her hand lovingly remembers it.” Now, surrounded by the artifacts of Oppenheim’s inventive career, New Yorkers can make some memories of their own.
