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Meret Oppenheim

by Rafaël Newman

Her origins are in Paris, where the Surrealists accepted the barely twenty-year-old into their ranks. Meret Oppenheim's Le déjeuner en fourrure, her fur teacup, won the artist overnight renown in 1936; Man Ray's photographs made during this period, which display Meret Oppenheim's boyish beauty in a series of nude poses, accelerated the fame of an artist who had been hyped up into a muse. Her early success was to typecast her for decades, and may have been one of the causes of the artist's block that was to afflict her for some time: upon her return from Paris, she began a ceaseless interrogation of herself and her work.

The Paris years of carefree fantasy were succeeded by a phase of low productivity; the last third of her life, finally, saw the creation of an opulent oeuvre. Meret Oppenheim (1913 Berlin - 1985 Basel) was one of the few women of her generation to know international recognition during her lifetime, and was to become a model for many female artists.

"du" has set itself the task of providing surprise glimpses into a large and polymorphous body of work. The art historian Ursula Sinnreich describes Meret Oppenheim's encounter with the world of Surrealism. In this encounter she sees the foundation for a work whose combination of melancholy and irony reflects, in an exemplary fashion, one woman's path to a highly personal form of artistic expression. Bruno Steiger adopts

the artist's point of view in approaching her production, while Walo von Fellenberg and Jonathan Rousseau, both art theorists, take stock of the artist's effects upon her world. The journalist Barbara Sichtermann considers the meaning of a crisis of creativity in a society geared to performance. And Doris Fanconi's photo-essay, together with Fanni Fetzer's report, follows Meret Oppenheim to her ancestral home in Carona, in the Swiss canton of Ticino.

For all her changes of address between the Parisian and Bernese art scenes, Meret Oppenheim's quotidian history is still best - and most literally - legible in Southern Switzerland, where, as Fetzer discovered, the artist has left behind a trail of notes, bearing both historical and domestic details, posted on the walls and surfaces of her eccentric retreat. The family country-house just south of Lugano, the Casa Costanza, had been purchased in 1917 by Meret Oppenheim's maternal grandparents, Theodor and Lisa Wenger, who had the 18th-century palazzo repainted (in orange and blue, traces of which can still be made out). The summer residence was to be transformed into a more permanent home when, in the 1930s, Meret's father, Alfons Erich Oppenheim, was forced to flee Germany for Switzerland. The Oppenheims installed themselves in Carona, where Alfons, a physician whose German citizenship forbade him to practice in Switzerland, offered free treatment of local emergencies and devoted the rest of his time to a work entitled The ABCs of Characterology. The family's modest income was derived from the rent on the Wengers' villa in Basel.

After their parents' death, Meret and her siblings decided to have the Casa Costanza renovated; Meret herself, who had long been harboring plans for an extension, engaged the services of the young local architect Aurelio Galfetti, and, in the mid-sixties, had the place thoroughly modernized, without, however, entirely purging it of its history. The three siblings, with their various families and friends, went on to summer in the refurbished Casa on a time-sharing basis. Meret's guests during the seventies and eighties provide the foundations for a veritable Who's Who of the contemporary Swiss cultural scene: among others, she was visited by the artists David Weiss, Markus Raetz, and Daniel Spoerri, the gallery-owners Renée and Maurice Ziegler, the collectors Christoph and Dominique Bürgi, and the art historians Bice Curiger and Jacqueline Burckhardt, renowned for their creation of the art magazine Parkett. Conversation seems to have been vivid and omnivorous. In her contribution to the Casa's guestbook, Burckhardt drew up a list of the concerns, both global and local, preoccupying the company during her visit: centralità; the death of the bourgeoisie; 1968; icons; America; international artists posing as Pharisees; and cold mint tea with lemon and Ticinese honey.

Burckhardt also left behind a unicorn, painted into a medallion discovered in the wall of the salon when a mirror was removed to make way for a more contemporary decor. In this bit of bricolage, Burckhardt was following the example not only of her hostess, whose personal additions to the renovation can be admired throughout the house, but also of her fellow guests, as well as of friends of Meret's in general, many of whom left tangible souvenirs of their relationships with the artist in or on the grounds of the Casa. Thus the kitchen is guarded by a singing dragon, courtesy of Peter von Wattenwyl, and the salon contains pieces by Eva Aeppli and Cuno Amiet, while the games-room doubles as a museum, displaying the works of her artist friends.

The most intimate items on display at the Casa, however, are Meret's own handwritten instructions, injunctions and commandments, now in safekeeping and replaced on-site by photocopies of the valuable originals. The notes testify to their author's highly organized, extremely meticulous sensibility, as well as to her attachment to objects and the memories associated with them. In the kitchen: Do not discard broken crockery. Place it on the table in the studio. Please replace broken crockery immediately with items of equal value and quality. (This last repeated in French for good measure.) Never warm faience crockery in the oven. It cracks. In the bedroom: Alabaster is very sensitive. Do not allow candles to burn down completely (candlestick from Crete) 1973. On the way to the solaio, the open, airy room under the eaves typical of the Ticino: Never stand brooms on their bristles, hang them up or stand them on their handles. The record of a life is contained in the form of ostensibly trivial postings, now come from beyond the grave, traces of the erstwhile presence of a particular consciousness.

And Oppenheim's seems in fact from the outset to have been a highly verbal consciousness. Bruno Steiger maintains that a consideration of Oppenheim's art must take into account the extent to which it is also a poetic project, whereby he is careful first to broaden the scope of the term: "What is poetry? The word goes back to the Greek 'poiein' - make, finish, compose - and is colloquially used in the sense of the import of a mood, or of magic. We term 'poetic' that which has been 'made', and which captures us in a way we cannot rationally explain. For Valéry, the 'ambiguous word' poetry means, on the one hand, the 'movement of the mind striving towards creation', and, on the other hand, a creation that 'strives to move our minds'. If one takes the term as a synonym for the production and the effect of art, then one thinks of Marcel Duchamp's definition, which holds that the creative act is the expression of the difference between the remains of the non-representability of the artistic vision and the aesthetic surplus of what has also been represented, but against the artist's will. For Duchamp, too, therefore, the incorrect, the 'mistake' seems to be that which gives the work of art its legitimacy in the first place. In an error that is always only half-willed, and which excludes all other possible errors, he sees that 'art-coefficient' which makes art of art and poetry of poetry - a 'hole that represents the artist's inability to express his intentions completely.'" Within this enlarged field for the "poetic," furthermore, Steiger finds Oppenheim's practical application of Duchamp's theory distinguished by the fact that its particular "art-generating difference" is already present in the very idea for a piece, and does not wait for the work's execution to make its appearance. Steiger quotes Oppenheim's famous formulation of the role of sudden inspiration in her work - "Every notion is born along with its form. I make reality of ideas as they come into my head" - and reads in it proof of the artist's drive to an empirical experience of Duchamp's analytical construct. "One could go further," Steiger writes, "in those cases in which the poetic difference is already active in the basic notion, and set against Duchamp's art-coefficient an 'Oppenheim poetry factor,' one that is no longer dependent upon the coincidences arising during the realization of an idea. Meret Oppenheim draws her resources from the vacancy left by what has already been completed; she seems, in her best work, to be bringing to life nothing other than this gap: not as an example or as a metaphor, but as the gap itself."

Ursula Sinnreich's investigation of the young Oppenheim's formative years in Paris (see excerpt translated below) reconstructs the operation of this "poetry factor" in the origins of the artist's renowned fur-covered teacup of 1936. Sinnreich relates the role of coincidence in the very emergence of the notion that would become Oppenheim's "trademark." The story goes that the young artist was sitting with Dora Maar and Picasso in the Café de Flore. Oppenheim was wearing one of her handmade pieces of jewelry, a fur-covered tube she had designed for Schiaparelli. Picasso remarked that one could trim anything at all in fur, and Oppenheim suggested the cup and saucer before her on the table. When, sometime later, André Breton asked her to participate in a show of Surrealist objects, Oppenheim decided to make of her notion a work of art. Le déjeuner en fourrure (Luncheon in Fur) fulfilled two crucial conditions of the Surrealist manifesto: it owed its creation to a simple coincidence, and it represented the aestheticization of an everyday object by means of its alienation. Thus it was to become, in short order, a standard-bearer of the movement, and would go on to be acquired for the permanent collection of the still-young New York MOMA.

In a brilliant reading of the teacup that supplements Steiger's construction of Oppenheim's artistic process, Sinnreich demonstrates just how theoretically and intellectually subtle Oppenheim's artwork could be, despite its having been born of a coincidental notion and midwifed by the "poetry factor." The artist had herself chosen a matter-of-fact, not to say prosaic title for the piece: Fur-Covered Cup, Saucer, and Spoon. It was André Breton who chose the title under which the teacup was to become famous, a title that Oppenheim herself was eventually to adopt as the standard catalog reference. Breton's title, by contrast with Oppenheim's, was an allusive portmanteau, awakening associations with two infamous creations of the 19th century: Edouard Manet's Déjeuner

sur l'herbe (Luncheon in the Grass), a tableau featuring a picnic shared by a naked woman and two very well-dressed men; and Leopold Sacher-Masoch's Venus im Pelz (Venus in Furs), the masochist's bible. It thus assigned Oppenheim's work to an iconography of fetishism and the projection of male fantasies onto the screen of the female body: Sinnreich cites Rubens' nude portrait of his lover, Hélène Fourment, decked loosely in a fur, as a further aesthetic forebear elected for Oppenheim's work by Breton's suggestive title. "The emphasis upon the contrast between the marble paleness of the buxom, generous body and the tactile stimulus of the darkly glowing fur creates a sensual effect, in both Rubens' picture and in Sacher-Masoch's descriptions of female bodies; an effect that André Breton's title projects directly onto the fur teacup." Oppenheim's contribution to this tradition, Breton might have added, was typically Surrealist. Whereas the older works had referred directly to the stimulating potential of the encounter between skin and fur, the fur-covered teacup permits only a mentally associative reconstruction of the contrast: a reconstruction at two removes, as it were. For alabaster skin, Oppenheim has substituted porcelain, and she has blocked even that surface from the spectator's gaze by covering it entirely in fur.

Sinnreich, however, goes beyond Breton's eroticized reading of the teacup: as a fetish, as a projection screen, as the withholder of phallic gratification. She locates the teacup's capacity for irritation precisely there where it seems, à la Breton, to be closest to accepting its role in the sexual economy. "If the provocation of Déjeuner sur l'herbe consisted in its exhibition of nakedness... then Meret Oppenheim's fur-covered teacup issues its challenge precisely by covering its object seamlessly in the precious fur, and thus turning away the gaze from its 'naked' surface. The artist thus launches not only a simple reversal of relations, but uses the material that she has selected for her camouflage to ignite a double desire: for a glimpse of that which is hidden from view, and, above all, for a feel of that which is exhibited. Thus the actual explosive potential of the work lies in its utter refusal to be subjected to this twofold desire." Still, the sensual dimension of the object was not simply to be converted into discourse, and it became a constant of the discussion surrounding the teacup to refer to its allegedly female form, its capacity for containment (and engulfment), its evocation of the practice of oral sex and of the yearning for fulfillment said to be harbored by women. Sinnreich maintains that all of these "interpretations" miss the significance of Oppenheim's work, both the physical and the metaphysical: "What they ignore is the refusal implicit in the very structure of the work, a refusal not only of the sensual desire set in motion by the work itself, but also of the desire of its interpreters."

But what of the desire of Oppenheim's fellow creators, of that whole generation of artists who took up her extension of the Surrealistic vocabulary? Have they been capable of extracting Oppenheim's lesson from the layers of interpretive wish-fulfillment and fantasy projection? Walo von Fellenberg and Jonathan Rousseau begin their account of Oppenheim's epigones, not surprisingly, with a consideration of the artist's best-known work, now evaluated as to its practical, functional significance for the history of modern art. "The fur-covered teacup," they write, "tends as energetically as it does simply to a hitherto unknown form of representational contrast, once one has extended the Surrealist process - that of combining things that do not belong together into a previously unsuspected constellation - to the materials used. This perspective is entirely alien to Surrealism. At the heart of the teacup's attraction/repulsion lies the contrast between porcelain and fur." Although they do not resist the temptation to read it erotically (if at the same time stressing its resistance to the erotic), von Fellenberg and Rousseau thus assign the piece a pivotal role in the emergence of something more substantial than simply a post-post-Surrealism. The teacup, for von Fellenberg and Rousseau, represents an expansion of the potential inherent in the collage and the readymade, and as such constitutes Oppenheim's move towards "a unique sort of material challenge."

Among the visual artists the authors identify as having been influenced by this move of Oppenheim's are Eva Hesse, Jesus Raphaël Soto, Esther Altdorfer, Markus Raetz, and Mariann Grunder. (True to her polymorphous nature, Oppenheim was also influential in the careers of the dancer Daniel Spoerri and the writer Rolf Geissbühler.) Hesse's series of Accessions seem to invite the viewer to curl up, naked and fetus-like, inside them, to experience them tactilely, and thus echo the challenge issued by the teacup: "The whole body becomes capable of reacting to an imaginary tactile encounter of the lips with the bushy edge of the cup." Hesse may be counted among the pioneers of a "sensual formalism" to which Soto also belongs, whose "all-over" sculptures are committed to "a very close connection with our tactile imagination and our sense of touch." Altdorfer, meanwhile, experienced her artistic indebtedness to Oppenheim in a largely negative fashion: her creations constituted a sustained resistance to the power of the woman who exercised such a troubling influence on her. A far more direct influence is visible in Raetz's playful portrait of the artist, which refers explicitly both to the Man Ray photograph and to the teacup by embedding in a nest of fur a painting of Oppenheim in her printing-press posture. Grunder's work, finally, also represents just such a frank gesture of tribute, by assembling objects inspired by Oppenheim's atelier into a sculptural tableau. And her Bed, a bitumen-soaked felt coverlet that at once attracts and repels its viewers, puts into practice precisely that revitalizing of the Surrealist use of contrast that von Fellenberg and Rousseau had identified as Oppenheim's signal contribution to the latter-day movement.

According to Barbara Sichtermann, however, such a rationalized view of Oppenheim's "influence" and "followers" is surely wrong, or at least wrong-headed. Genius, artistic talent, inspiration - what Oppenheim called the notion, or that which literally falls into one - cannot be taught, let alone promoted or sponsored. The will to do so is a product of a performance-oriented, production-driven society; the proof that it can only lead to failure and to a blockage of the very drives it seeks to release is proven by Oppenheim's own experience during the long years of artistic fallowness that ensued upon her return from Paris. "Creativity is animalistic, anarchic, tellurian," Sichtermann writes, "although it arises in the head and is considered a mental power. To seek to conjure it up in the first place is an error." Better to lie low, and to allow the world's aggressive calls for productivity based on previous output to die away, as Oppenheim did in Switzerland after her early success in France: "When you are speaking a new, private language, one that no one understands, you must sometimes wait a long time before you get an echo." And, as von Fellenberg and Rousseau note, considering her moss-overgrown fountain tower in Bern, Oppenheim trusted in the passage of time.

Freedom. The Harpoons Are Flying

by Ursula Sinnreich

Once upon a time there was a girl. Her parents called her Meret, just like the lovely, godless girl in Gottfried Keller's novel Green Henry. The girl grew up to be a beautiful woman, just as clever as the figure in the novel, and just as rebellious, too. But men saw only what a beautiful body she had, and felt a magical attraction to her. So one day a photographer decided to capture her youthful grace in a picture. He photographed her naked, at the controls of a printing press, her hand and her lower arm black with ink, and came up with a few other ideas for turning her body into an object of eternal desire. Almost eighty years after these photographs were taken, people still remembered the pictures of that flawless body, and breathed anew its mysterious air of reverie, when they heard its owner's name: Meret Oppenheim.

Meret Oppenheim herself, twenty-one at the time, surely never dreamt that these pictures would lay the foundation for her own myth when she agreed to pose for a series of nude photos by Man Ray in 1933. It had been the American photographer's idea to shoot the artist in front of a printing press in the atelier of the cubist painter Louis Marcoussis; and, since the two knew each other well, Meret Oppenheim saw nothing at all spectacular in her posing nude. But her willingness to have the photos published in the magazine Minotaure was meant as an act of rebellion. It was a conscious gesture of sympathy with the attitude of the Surrealists, who opposed stuck-up bourgeois morality wherever possible, a morality that accorded Eros recognition only in the fulfillment one's procreative duty. The scandal was quick to come, since the photo was printed along with an essay by André Breton in which beauty was equated with a convulsion, and defined as "explosante-fixe" and "magique-circonstantielle."

Both the title and the composition of the picture of Meret Oppenheim at the printing press come very close to meeting such expectations. Man Ray called the "portrait" Erotique-voilé, and indeed, it does anything but straightforwardly display the simple likeness of its subject's figure. In a magical play of light and shade, Man Ray staged Oppenheim's body in such a way as to make of it an eternal symbol of sensual introversion. By having the curves of her woman's body merge with the roundness of the wheel, and by melding the cool darkness of the metal with the bright luster of her naked skin, Man Ray's subtle dramaturgy suggests an encounter of body and machine whereby activity (her reaching hand) is balanced against passivity (her propped-up arm). It is precisely these allusions, optically indeterminate, that make of her body a screen for the projection of fantasies, a pas-de-deux for woman and machine. This highly cerebral representational strategy thus serves not only to figure a female body in as sensitive a form as possible, but also includes in the picture the desire informing the viewing of this body. The photographer's gaze causes the woman's body to appear as the sign of female sensuality, and not the physical presence of Meret Oppenheim herself. To this day, the erotic power these pictures emanate is undiminished. Virtually everything published on the work of Meret Oppenheim uses these photographs to give an impression of the woman "behind" the work. The artist bore with equanimity the rise of her image - and one produced from the male perspective, at that - to the status of her representative. But her tolerance did not extend to one crucial area: she always categorically refused to allow Man Ray's photographs to be included in any exhibit of her own works. She failed to see what her work had to do with this "corps de jeune fille," and she was still resisting its inclusion as late as 1984, a year before her death.

And she had in fact been a young girl when, in 1932, together with her friend, the painter Irène Zurkinden, she left Basel for Paris. She seems to have made up her mind early on to become an artist. Her parents had been cosmopolitan and open to all the arts, and Oppenheim enjoyed precocious contact with artists like Hugo Ball, Hermann Hesse, Walter Bodmer, Otto Abt and others. The fact that Meret Oppenheim could count among her family members a role model for her life as an artist, however, must have been every bit as important as her introduction to the contemporary art world by people whose own work had contributed to its development. Her grandmother, Lisa Wenger-Ruutz, had in her younger years been one of the few female students at the renowned Düsseldorf Academy of the Arts, and was known during her lifetime as a painter. When Meret Oppenheim came to Paris, Surrealism was little more than a word to her. She made her first contacts with the art scene through other Swiss artists in residence there. Alberto Giacometti, to whom she showed her work in 1933, introduced her to Hans Arp; thanks to Giacometti, she was allowed to exhibit in the Salon des Surindépendants. From then on she was a member of the Surrealists, the group around André Breton whose regular meeting place was the Café de la Place Blanche. She always spoke up against the oft-repeated view that she had served this group as a muse: "I didn't say much at the time, and that was a good thing, because I didn't understand much French." She characterized herself as a listener, a role she shared with the other women associated with the Surrealists in the early 30s - as, for example, Leonor Fini, or Dorothea Tanning. But she may have had another reason to be suspicious of the notion that she had served as a muse. Muses only appear to be powerful women, after all. Their role consists in inspiring "great" men to perform extraordinary feats. Since the days of the Greeks, who invented them, there has never been any mention of these godly creatures' possessing their own creative powers. Yet it was a wish to develop her own creativity that had driven Meret Oppenheim to Paris in the first place. "Finally! Freedom! The harpoons are flying. The rainbow is in the streets." She appended these lines to the side of a 1933 drawing featuring an irregular quadrangle containing a round double circle marked little fountain. The artist has replaced the corners of the quadrangle with tiny circles, themselves bound directly to the fountain with tenderly sketched lines. She called these round shapes "echo," and they seem to mirror what is happening in the fountain. Here is how the poem ends: "Little fountain. I repeat: little fountain. Wind and cries from afar." To recognize herself as the source of bubbling inspiration, to proclaim it like an anthem, to hear the echo of her own words, to attend to herself, to set herself and others in motion: that is what she was trying to do in those days.

The Surrealist circle provided the room she needed to be able to assert her own freedom. The artists assembled under that ensign supported each other in a variety of ways, made each other's exhibits possible and helped each other escape from the jaws of their traditional roles. In her speech of thanks upon being awarded the city of Basel's prize for art in 1974, Meret Oppenheim referred to the difficulties faced by a woman who has decided to live as an artist: "It starts with what seem like external things. People are used to the idea that male artists live just as they please - and the bourgeoisie looks the other way. But let a woman do the same, and all eyes are upon her. And that's not all one has to learn to accept. I might even say that a woman has the duty to show, by means of the life she leads, that she considers outdated all the taboos that have kept women in a state of subordination for millennia. Liberty is not granted, it must be taken."

Her life was not made up only of such moments of serene self-confidence, however. In 1937 Meret Oppenheim had returned to Switzerland to be confronted by a crisis that was to last eighteen years. The "inner emptiness" that came over her had its origins, according to her own account, in experiences other than those of her Parisian sojourn. "It was as if the millennia of discrimination against women were weighing down on my shoulders, like a feeling of inferiority lodged deep within me." The figure of Genevieve played a central role in the beginnings and in the end of this crisis. The fairy tale tells of a young queen who has been falsely accused of adultery and condemned to death. Out of compassion with her, however, the executioner merely turns her out, with her son, in the forest. The queen's exile lasts seven years. When the king recognizes her innocence, he brings her back home to the castle, where she dies shortly thereafter.

Meret Oppenheim found the reason for her fascination with this figure in her reading of Carl Gustav Jung. By the terms of Jung's doctrine of archetypes, she defined the artist's personality, independent of sex, as made up of both male and female components. According to this theory, the male artist's creative power would have at its disposal a spiritually female component in the same proportions as the female artist's creativity would possess a spiritually male component. Women must conceal this spiritually male component, however, "since men have been projecting their own devalued femaleness onto women since the establishment of the patriarchy, that is, since the devaluation of the female. For women, this means that they must live out their own femaleness as well as that which men project onto them. They are women raised to an exponential power." With the crisis over in 1956, the artist felt herself abandoned by her spiritually male genius, as the queen had been by her husband, and she painted a picture entitled Genevieve and the Four Echoes. It unmistakably takes up the constellation of the Little Fountain, the image that had accompanied her poem of liberty in 1933. The little fountain has now grown large, and is revealed as a dark figure stretching out on all sides, whose soft, inwardly directed curves seem to have been conjured up by the bright echoes. The darkness is in retreat, the distant voices have come nearer. Precisely such a reversibility of the direction of reading, both of the poem and of the representations associated with it, says a great deal about the way Meret Oppenheim experienced her life and work. At the beginning there is the breakaway, the attack signal given full-throatedly, a signal that proceeds from the source of inspiration and is carried off by the wind in all four celestial directions. And at the end there is the echoes' return home to the point of departure, whither they bring with them the light of the world. In between there is the deep dark, and the great loss.