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  • Nobody Will Give You Freedom You Have To Take It *
  • Lisa Jaye Young (bio)
Meret Oppenheim: Beyond the Teacup, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, June 28–October 9, 1996.

Loyal captain Tell me Show me the place in the clouds That the wing of the swallow opened The valley of waves in the goddess’ hair The green lights in the forest. Here it is night— Evil brooms kill the kobolds No wheel turns anymore Darkness does not know itself Nor does it ask It is a fist within a fist That no one sees

—Meret Oppenheim, 1944

Meret Oppenheim: Beyond the Teacup, curated by Bice Curiger and Jacqueline Burckhardt, was one of the past year’s most revealing and inspiring exhibitions. Accompanying the curatorial statement was a haunting black-and-white photograph of the artist, taken just five years before her death. Oppenheim’s direct stare, her eyes confident and unafraid, and her knowing partial smile remained in my mind for weeks after my initial visit to the show at the Guggenheim Museum, one of a number of sites for this traveling exhibition organized by Independent Curators Incorporated, New York. Images of the artist herself, including this opening portrait and another, Portrait with Tattoo (1980), continued to burn in memory like a retinal afterimage. The spirit of this portrait manifested itself in abstract visual form in each work displayed. Her abundant strength of character and her self-assurance informed each work she created, conveying a certain comfortable confrontation with life and death. It is this spirit and character that infused and fed the entire exhibition like a mountain spring, flowing into and through her objects and paintings, drawings and collages, poetry and performances. [End Page 46]

Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) is most frequently and conveniently categorized as a Surrealist. Overnight fame came with her Object (Breakfast in Fur), a fur-covered teacup, saucer, and spoon, which was exhibited in the first exhibition devoted to Surrealist object art at the Galérie Charles Ratton in Paris in May 1936. This work gained her instant membership in the Surrealists’ club and was immediately acquired for the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it still remains today as an icon of the entire Surrealist movement. But the celebrity of this object has, perversely, distorted an understanding of Oppenheim’s art. Her work is not concerned with a total societal revolution, something many Surrealists viewed as the purpose of their art. The Surrealists were zealously impatient to change the present, but Oppenheim’s work instead reflected a patient, carefully considered understanding of a larger, less socially-specific order in the world. Her work is a roadmap of several themes intertwining together to illustrate her own lifeline, which, according to the artist, began as early as 60,000 B.C.; it is not about activism on this earth, but stands instead as a testament to intuition, a rendering in visual form of such themes as the power of nature and death. And in this way it prefigures the work of feminist artists of the 1970s and early 1980s.

Oppenheim’s work shares formal concerns with pre-Surrealist artists such as Paul Klee (a fellow-resident of the city of Bern) with his playful, anthropomorphic shapes; Jean Arp, with his softened solidity of abstract forms and his philosophical devotion to nature; and the nineteenth-century Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin. Böcklin’s 1880 painting The Island of the Dead shares compositional qualities with Oppenheim’s abstract work Man’s Fate (1973), as well as a certain sullen yet accepting fascination with the psychological landscape and the territory that lies beyond the earthly world.

Oppenheim’s childhood in Switzerland must have had an enormous impact on the development of her own personal catalogue of symbols, shapes, and objects. Though born in 1913 in Berlin, she spent her early childhood with her mother in her maternal grandparents’ home in the Jura Mountains near Bern. There she was greatly influenced by her grandmother, Lisa Wenger-Ruutz, an artist and well-known illustrator of children’s books. Her grandmother’s visual alphabet of smiling trees and grinning pears, along with her own...

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