Meret Oppenheim

Through around a hundred pieces, the exhibition on Meret Oppenheim at the MASI in Lugano is built around combinations, debts, credits and affinities ranging, as the title suggests, from Max Ernst to Mona Hatoum.

“But how can you eat that? It is inedible!” The clumsy words of a four-year-old girl, sitting on her father’s shoulders, cut through the soft golden air that surrounds the Meret Oppenheim retrospective at the MASI in Lugano. Her inquisitive finger points at a bread statue within a display case – the shape resembles a chess piece, the White Queen – stuffed with partridge bones arranged a little like a spinal column. A knife on the right, a fork on the left, the Queen lies on a napkin resting on a plate, which in turn is laid on a chess board-place mat. The wine, according to the caption on the wall, has evaporated. This work, from 1966, which Oppenheim dedicated to her friend Duchamp, is entitled Bon Appétit Marcel!

View of the exhibition "Meret Oppenheim. Works in dialogue from Max Ernst to Mona Hatoum" at MASILugano. Photo Studio Pagi

The little girl pulls a face. “This is art”, her mother tries to explain, “it is a provocation”. But, not satisfied, she puts her unprepared parents once more to the test when, half an hour later, she finds herself faced with two light-blue gloves decorated with veins (Oppenheim, Gloves [Copy], 1985, which, here, are placed together with those in bronze by André Breton, Guant de femme aussi, circa 1928) and two women’s boots joined at the tip (Oppenheim, The couple, 1956, shown together with another improbable item of footwear like those, complete with toes, painted by Magritte in a famous gouache [Le modéle rouge, 1947]). The little girl looked at the two boots, joined as though they were siamese twins, and then her own shoes, and said: “Mummy, do you remember when you bought me two left shoes?”

This is where the heart of Meret Oppenheim’s art lies, in her presenting reality in an unexpected way, with the most caustically playful irony (in a theatrical production she played the curtain, she spent one carnival with a mask of bleeding steaks). A challenge to habit. Faced with her works, one passes from amused surprise to the deepest doubt. The dominant theme is often the subversion of the object in question and its transformation into something living, animal-like (“butterflies were among her favourite subjects”, recalls Dominique Bürgi, who is responsible for the orderly catalogue of all of the artist’s work). When, at the age of eighteen, she joined the surrealist group in Paris, she found herself at home, objects became fetishes, they gained the power of seduction.

Like all surrealists, Oppenheim combined the gift of fantasy with an extreme capacity for conciseness. Evidence of this lies in Breakfast in fur (1936, a porcelain cup and saucer covered in Chinese gazelle fur). The origin of this piece is well-documented. It was shown at the first “Exposition surrealiste d’objets”, held at the Galarie Charles Ratton in Paris in May of 1936. “Alfred H. Barr Jr. happened to pass by”, recalls Oppenheim in an old video introducing the MASI exhibition – we see her smoking and gesticulating in the shadow of a room, her hair cut very short, in front of a lit candle with the wonderful brass sculpture Six clouds on a bridge (also shown here) behind her. “He bought it for the MoMA for 250 Francs. The price I had asked for. I was very proud”.

Meret Oppenheim, Das Paar, 1956. Private collection

Meret Oppenheim, Projekt fur Sandalen

Left: René Magritte, Le modäle rouge, 1947. Right: Meret Oppenheim, Tisch mit Vogelfässen, 1939-1982

R. Gober, Untitled (Red shoe), 1990

The first work by a female artist to become part of the new American museum’s collection, Breakfast in fur is not shown here – “it is no longer loaned out by MoMA because it is too fragile”, a note reads. Its absence is notable. In its place, a photograph by Man Ray (Le déjeuner de Meret Oppenheim, 1936), in which the furry cup throws its frayed shadow onto a smooth surface and, alongside, the collage Souvenier of a breakfast in fur, made with great spirit by the artist in 1970. An insider’s joke. This magnetic combination of organic and inorganic (like another example on display, Squirrel [1969], a mug of beer with a rodent’s tail instead of a handle) is an ideal representation of Oppenheim’s work.

Meret Elisabeth Oppenheim was born in October 1913 in Berlin to a German father and Swiss mother. She died in November 1985 in Basel, leaving instructions that her letters were not to be opened for another twenty years. Her maternal grandmother, a writer and illustrator of children’s tales, played an important role in her upbringing (her holiday home in Carona in Switzerland often welcomed artists and writers, including Hermann Hesse). Her father, a doctor, introduced her to the psychoanalysis of Carl Gustav Jung. When she was sixteen, Meret gave her father, for his birthday, a maths book (shown here with the title Schoolgirl’s notebook), in which she had drawn the equation “X=Hase” (X=hare), underlining her already emerging inclination for unusual combinations.

Meret Oppenheim, <i>Portrait with tatooo</i>, 1980 — Meret Oppenheim, *Portrait with tatooo*, 1980

At the end of the Twenties she went to Basel. There she attended the academy and met Irène Zurkinden (who painted a large portrait of her in 1940, Portrait in front of the mirror, the first work to be seen in this exhibition). Together they moved to Paris, where she industriously, as she herself underlined, stepped into her role as a muse for the surrealists, with her more or less measured characterisations. In 1937 she returned to Basel. In 1949 she moved again, to Bern, where she entered Arnold Rüdlinger's group, the then director of the Kunsthalle. For decades, she existed precariously on the side-lines. She was brought into the limelight by an important retrospective organised by Pontus Hultén at the Modena Museet in Stockholm in 1967. From 1974 onwards, a series of important exhibitions were dedicated to her in Switzerland, Germany and France.

This exhibition at MASI, curated by Guido Comis in collaboration with Maria Giuseppina Di Monte, running until 28 May, presents more or less one hundred pieces grouped by theme (food, sexuality, body, nature, dream, mask, etc.). As the title – “Meret Oppenheim. Works in dialogue from Max Ernst to Mona Hatoum” – suggests, it is built around combinations, debts, credits and affinities. Affinities such as that with Ernst, with whom she had a long affair: to mark the end of their relationship, she presented him with an oil painting (Husch, husch, der schönste Vokal entleert sich, 1934, with the footnote: “M.E. par M.O.”) to which he answered with another painting (and dedication: “Auf Wiedersehen Meretli”, “goodbye little Meret”), shown at the end of the exhibition, in the section “self-portraits, friends, portraits”.

Left: Meret Oppenheim, Rîntgenaufnahme des Schoedels M.O., 1964. Right: Man Ray, Erotique voile, 1933 — Left: Meret Oppenheim, *Rîntgenaufnahme des Schoedels M.O.*, 1964. Right: Man Ray, *Erotique voile*, 1933

Among these is Alberto Giacometti, another fundamental figure, whose ear, at the beginning of 1933, was the model for the wax sculpture Giacometti’s ear (the bronze cast shown here is from 1959), with flowers in place of the helix and antihelix. Marcek Duchamp, here dressed as Rrose Sélavy, is paired with a photograph by Man Ray which depicts Oppenheim as a man reading the newspaper – the three widely examined the territory of hybrid sexuality and psychological androgyny (à la Jung). This can be seen in the splendid photographs from the Erotique Voilée series Man Ray, 1933), in which the young and uninhibited surrealist muse poses nude, stained with ink, alongside a press, with an ambiguous distribution of male and female parts.

With Oppenheim, the Woman – the Queen – strips bare, she always yields, even when she is disguised. She even rids herself of her own skin (despite holding on to rings and earrings) in the emblematic X-Ray of M.O.’s skull (1964), which has been used as the very effective image of this exhibition. In Spring banquet (Le Festin) (Bern, 15 April 1959), she depicted an opulent luncheon laid out on the body of a young woman for the pleasure of six guests, of which only one unfocused image remains today. However, and this is an aspect of all of the work of Meret Oppenheim, on which many have fed, she sets a particular limit of ambiguity and reticence, going beyond simple labels: she offers herself up for desire, but never for consumption; she remains inedible.

until 28 May 2017
Meret Oppenheim. Opere in dialogo da Max Ernst a Mona Hatoum
curated by Guido Comis with Maria Giuseppina Di Monte
MASILugano – Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana
Piazza Bernardino Luini 6, Lugano

Meret Oppenheim

Through around a hundred pieces, the exhibition on Meret Oppenheim at the MASI in Lugano is built around combinations, debts, credits and affinities ranging, as the title suggests, from Max Ernst to Mona Hatoum.

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