Meret Oppenheim Exhibition Is a Marvel about a Swiss Unicorn

The maker of the famous fur teacup is an artist like no other, and she gets the ravishing show she deserves, at MoMa.

M eret Oppenheim: My Exhibition is the new retrospective at MoMA about Oppenheim (1913–1985), the unclassifiable Swiss sculptor, painter, and photographer. Her Object, from 1936 — a teacup, saucer, and spoon lined with fur — drove the chattering classes mute with puzzlement and shock when it was displayed at the London International Surrealist Exhibition and at MoMA’s landmark Fantastic Art exhibition the same year. Also called Breakfast in Fur, it made Oppenheim both a wunderkind and something of a one-hit wonder, undeservedly so. My Exhibition rediscovers Oppenheim as an artist with a long career of strength upon strength. It’s presented with confidence and quiet class. I loved it.

Object, suggesting an anxiety dream about cunnilingus, features in every survey of Surrealism and most Western art-history surveys. What did Oppenheim do with the next 50 years of her life? Most art historians, unless they specialize in Surrealism or, more exotically, Swiss art wouldn’t know much about her, Object aside.

MoMA shows us she did a lot, and all of it’s good, sometimes divine, sometimes absurdly so, and sometimes positively devilish. And MoMA presents her work with erudition and elegance. A New York show with depth, surprise, good art, and a sublime arrangement is a marvel, a rare bird, and a pleasure.

If we’re wanting to put artists in boxes, she’s a Surrealist, but Oppenheim is really her own thing. Swiss, spending most of her life in boring Bern, working when women artists weren’t always taken seriously, and with a style all her own, Oppenheim is well worth knowing and honoring. Good for MoMA for giving her a place in the sun. The show has already been to the perfect Menil Collection in Houston and the Kunstmuseum in Bern.

Oppenheim was born in Berlin and named, prophetically, for Meretlein, a character from the Swiss novel Green Henry. Meretlein is a feral child, beautiful, yes, but not very Swiss in her demeanor, habits, and opinions. Oppenheim’s Swiss grandparents, whom she visited often, lived near the French border. This and avant-garde family values made art trips to Paris part of her teenage life. My Exhibition begins with Oppenheim’s teenage art, both drawings and watercolors. There’s Strangling Angel, Suicide Institute, and very odd depictions of Alaska, of all places, all from the late ’20s and very early ’30s. She was immersed in old German fairy tales and recorded her dreams. I wouldn’t hire her as a babysitter, but I’d love to be in her charge if I were a child.

“Finally, freedom,” she wrote in 1932 as an 18-year-old and freshly moved to Paris to be an artist. “The harpoons fly!” Paris was the center of Surrealism, a movement based on dreams, gender bending, automatic writing, and new theories about psychology. Oppenheim, pretty, precocious, and fearless, became a mascot for the circle of André Breton. Picasso, Duchamp, Arp, Giacometti, and Picabia knew and liked her. She had a fling with Max Ernst, as did most women Surrealists.

Object made her famous. The sculpture springs from a coffee date Oppenheim had with Picasso and Dora Maar. Oppenheim wore a brass tube bracelet covered with fur. She’d designed it and just sold the design to Elsa Schiaparelli, who sometimes drew from Surrealist imagery. Picasso quipped that everything would look better if lined with fur, “even this cup,” pointing to what I assume was his manly, doppio espresso and not a diet free-range pumpkin-spice mocha frappe. With an idea aborning, Oppenheim bought a piece of speckled Chinese gazelle fur and wrapped a teacup, saucer, and spoon in it. Once exhibited, it was a sensation. MoMA bought it from its Fantastic Art show.

Object is the impetus for My Exhibition. It’s a teacup, so it evokes refinement and decorum. Women give tea parties. It’s domestic. Chinese gazelle fur is, on the one hand, rare and elegant and, on the other, the hide of an animal. It’s a visual pun in that “drinking from a furry cup” is a French euphemism for cunnilingus. It certainly wouldn’t have occurred to the Swiss. Putting sex aside, fur is soft and lovely but yucky if we put it in our mouths. Bad-dream yucky.

Is it a powerful work of art? What’s called “gender-affirming surgery,” or sexual mutilation, seems more gruesome and more incendiary. Object is there, in a little case, amid Oppenheim’s early work. It’s not in your face, so to speak. That’s the right way to treat it. Oppenheim isn’t a one-hit wonder.

I suspect, though no Sherlock Holmes am I, that the curators would love to discover Swiss patriarchs flattening the girl artist into slush, since there’s no dust in Switzerland. What survives from her art in the ’40s is very good. The Erl Queen from 1940, Sun, Moon, and Stars, from 1942, and War and Peace, from 1943, are Surrealist and wonderful. Red Head, Blue Body, from 1936, and Mountains Opposite Agnuzzo, from 1937, show Oppenheim was as much immersed in the world of Arp and the Blue Rider Group. She’s not struggling for a style. Oppenheim’s strength is in variousness and experimentation. She’s not an artist to be put in a box. The Swiss and the Germans are big on classification. Oppenheim can’t be classified, and that’s good and rare.

These works from the ’40s aside, Oppenheim was mostly inactive from the time of fame-making Object, her breakup with Ernst, and the war until the mid ’50s. Her father, who had some Jewish ancestry, had moved to Switzerland with Oppenheim’s entire family. In 1937, fearing that war was on the horizon, she returned to Switzerland, and, as many young people do in a time of economic or political stress, went to school, in her case an art school, where she learned technique for the first time. She got a job as an art conservator. The ’30s turned into the ’40s and then the ’50s. She made art, some of it in the show and very good, but destroyed a lot. She blamed the war and, as she said, “the whole patriarchal world falling on my neck.” She later said the ’40s and early ’50s were a long period of depression for her, what she called a crisis of confidence.

What she did from the mid ’50s until her death isn’t necessarily what I’d call Surrealism. Clouds might look like chariots and moons sprout butterfly wings, but I look at her work as a unique strand of abstraction. The refinement and quiet beauty of her work aside, Oppenheim worked in almost all media. She was a master painter but also made sculpture starting with found objects and did collages, pastel drawings, watercolors, and oil paintings. Her geometrical studies are strong, and her paintings of fog, though not huge, are immersive and enchanting. She’s always curious and never formulaic — unlike Alex Katz, whose retrospective at the Guggenheim I wrote about on Thursday. He’s the king of formula.

I have to say something about MoMA’s arrangement of Oppenheim’s art. Oppenheim isn’t exactly an artist of serenity. She’s an artist treating mystery, an artist after puzzlements, and an artist comfortable with many techniques.

A light curatorial touch was essential, as was one conscious of balance. The galleries show sculpture, painting, and drawing in equipoise, with splashes of color for excitement since Oppenheim’s work tends to be quiet. The art has space. There’s room for surprise. I think the curators were perfectly in tune with the artist. They didn’t indulge in any curatorial aggrandizement. The gallery text is clear but unobtrusive. The curator invites visitors to fall in love with the beauty of Oppenheim’s work and leave it at that or probe it further.

The final wall in the show displays New Stars and other geometric paintings from the ’70s. Opposite this wall is a work that’s as edgy as Object. It’s an X-ray of Oppenheim’s head, torso, and hands, made in 1964 and printed as a gelatin silver print in 1981. It’s a vanitas, showing her loop earrings and rings on her fingers. Her hands are in the position of prayer. On the walls flanking her geometric pictures are exquisite crayon drawings with titles drawn from mythological stories.

My Exhibition refers to a group of twelve large drawings Oppenheim created in 1983 visualizing what she thought would be a good retrospective of her work. The drawings get a place of pride in the exhibition. They’re big and, done in colored pencil, attractive, but they’re a distraction. I don’t think Oppenheim’s plan corresponds with what MoMA did, and we don’t know whether or not the Guggenheim deployed her plan in its 1996 Oppenheim retrospective or whether or not Swiss museums used it in exhibitions about Oppenheim in the ’80s.

The drawings occupy a big gallery smack in the middle of the MoMA show. Why? They’re specialized, catalogue material, and 40 years old. Why not use the space to savor the real thing rather than her designs for her own retrospective?

The last gallery shows a filmed interview with Oppenheim from 1978. There’s comfortable, low-slung sofa seating, and that’s rare. Most museums show exhibition videos sans seating. Alas, exhibition designers present the video via four cameras switching from screen to screen every few seconds, each screen on a different wall. I once did a mean Watusi but no longer swivel with ease. The interview looked good, but after a few minutes, I decided it was a whiplash hazard.

I think it’s a great exhibition, with a catalogue that’s good and short. Object aside, Oppenheim isn’t as revered as she should be. If there’s a body of experts on Swiss art, I don’t know who they are, and unlike the art of France, Spain, England, or the Netherlands, there’s no trajectory of Swiss art. There’s the issue of accessibility, too. Most of Oppenheim’s work is in Swiss private collections, and what goes to Swiss private collections stays there, and in museums in Bern. I can think of only two people I know who’ve been to Bern.

I also think Oppenheim struggled culturally with a decisive, fundamental Swiss conservatism as well as a Swiss obsession with order and regularity. This makes for a renegade. Harpoons indeed flew but ever so subtly, with grace more than verve.