The Prolific Material Synthesis of Meret Oppenheim

In a 1975 acceptance speech for the Art Award of the City of Basel, Meret Oppenheim said, “Nobody will give you freedom . . . you have to take it.”1 The ethos of Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition embodies the spirit of relentless self-determination found amongst women working in the surrealist sphere whose artistic achievements were often overlooked. Although she proved the rare exception in attaining immediate artistic recognition for her 1936 breakthrough work Object, Oppenheim had to maintain this attitude throughout her career because her influence calcified at that critical inflection point. This major traveling retrospective of approximately two hundred works organized by Anne Umland, Nina Zimmer, and Natalie Dupêcher with Lee Colón, seen first at the Kunstmuseum Bern (22 October 2021–13 February 2022), then at the Menil Collection, Houston (25 March–18 September 2022) and finally at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (30 October 2022–4 March 2023), provides a long overdue opportunity to question, reassess, and amend the myopic characterizations ascribed to a canonically significant artist. The comprehensive survey succeeds in correcting Oppenheim’s truncated legacy by adducing a remarkable number of her works across mediums to construct a cohesive timeline that reveals, on Oppenheim’s own terms, how she developed a sophisticated creative universe throughout her practice.

Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition follows a loose chronology divided into ten sections, each meant to showcase how Oppenheim’s abounding output comprised a variety of mediums amongst which she alternated effortlessly while examining different themes throughout her life. In what feels like a surrealist game, the exhibition opens with works directly on both the left and right walls, which requires the visitor to choose their own adventure upon arrival. This bifurcation creates two interpretations with which to understand the beginnings of Oppenheim’s career, each recounting different but very closely related parts of a larger narrative. Both paths ultimately meet at the center of the opposite end of the room that displays works at the intersection of art and fashion made in the mid-1930s, the period that launched her art onto the international platform.

By choosing to start one’s visit by looking to the left, one is greeted by One-Eyed (Einauge), a work from 1933, which depicts a monophthalmic figure draped in a red gown peering expectantly, hands folded atop a balustrade, like a groundskeeper patiently awaiting its guests’ arrival. This figure marks the entry point into a dreamscape universe, one uniquely Oppenheim’s own. The work is immediately followed by three others created between 1933–34, made in a variety of mediums that portray a cast of biomorphic characters who help Oppenheim’s visual language take form. This series of abstractions of the human body introduces the exhibition’s earliest highlight, Little Ghost Eating Bread (Kleines Gespenst, Brot essend), an oil on canvas from 1934. In this painting, a wispy figure with a slight but mischievous smile painted in a rich array of blues and browns holds a loaf of bread while scampering away from a mysterious dark outline suggestive of a suited man.

The scene takes place in front of a white cube on a ledge that hovers effortlessly above four crescent moons and a forest of trees, which demonstrates the artist’s inclination towards flattened pictorial space and distorted perspectives early on in her career. Oppenheim’s predilection for these modes of representation foreshadows her imminent exploration of surrealist aesthetic sensibilities, as seen in the subsequent series of works one walks past that includes Quick, Quick, the Most Beautiful Vowel Is Voiding, M.E by M.O. (Husch-husch, der schönste Vokal entleert sich, M.E. par M.O.) from 1934. The “M.E.” in the work’s title references Max Ernst, an allusion confirmed by the grey plume that evokes Loplop, Ernst’s avian alter ego commonly featured in his own works. Oppenheim’s nod to an esoteric motif that relates to a key member of the surrealist inner circle signifies her proximity to the movement by 1934. The curatorial decision to open this version of the show’s introduction with such playfully amorphous paintings, most of which had not been exhibited in the United States before, attests to the artist’s mastery over a medium with which she was not hitherto associated.

The optimistic account of a confident, young surrealist’s promising career contrasts with the somber alternative that conveys an artist fraught with perturbation and despair. If one begins the exhibition with the works presented on the wall to the right of the entrance, one will find the show’s earliest works, Suicides’ Institute (Selbstmörder-Institute) and Votive Picture (Strangling Angel) (Votivbild [Würgengel]), which both date to 1931. Also included in this series, Anatomy of a Dead Woman (Anatomie einer toten frau) is a macabre painting from 1934 of a dead woman whose head and lungs have collapsed in on themselves. As evinced by not only their titles and subject matters but also Oppenheim’s adept engagement with the materiality of ink and paint, these works viscerally and candidly convey an astute sense of corporeal anguish. During a time when women associated with the surrealist movement were relegated to the muted role of objectified muse, such a jarring series of works that directly confronts the physicality of violence and death serves as a historic counterpoint to document how women explored the harrowing side of their lived realities through their own bodies. Votive Picture (Strangling Angel) (Votivbild [Würgengel]), depicts a mother figure holding its strangled child as it bleeds out, which can be seen as a representation that contends against both literal and metaphorical childbearing. Such a work augurs the professional perils that would await Oppenheim as a woman artist with the impending rampant triumph of her first major artwork Object, a victim of its own success that in turn cast a shadow on Oppenheim’s future creations as she endeavored to further establish her career.

Both introductory sections serve as two necessary sides of the same coin that together lead to the pivotal section of the exhibit that features quotidian objects elevated into fashion-inspired artworks. Oppenheim’s ability to deftly experiment across mediums begins to shine here, setting a striking tone of creative freedom that characterizes the rest of the show. This juncture of the exhibition invites the viewer to see the world through an artist’s eyes, a liberating vantage point where any mundane item can be envisaged into an artwork. The show’s inherent female gaze inspires introspection about topics ranging from dreams, nature, poetry, fashion, and death. She was a master of craft who possessed a profound command of material that resulted in an adroit ability to turn everyday objects into artworks. While Object is featured in this area, it purposefully gets lost in the presentation and is by no means the focal point, quickly eclipsed by other intriguing examples of Oppenheim’s artistic prowess.

Presented on a silver platter, in My Nurse (Mein Kindermädchen) from 1936/1967, a pair of white high heels are tied together with string and inverted so the soles of the shoes face upward. The heels are capped with paper frill booties, rendering the shoes into an art object reminiscent of a turkey. The work, made of feminized found objects to conjure an image of domesticity, possesses a sinister undertone. Tears (Tränen) from 1981 stands out as another sculpture that embodies Oppenheim’s knack for synthesizing found materials into astonishing reimagined forms. In this work, a shattered rearview mirror, a broken branch, and metal rod are configured into an anthropomorphic figure whose blue glass flickers in the light, like tears streaming down a face. Using materials found both in nature and urban spaces, this talismanic relic causes the viewer to reflect on the continual cycles of growth and decay, and life and death.

Oppenheim’s series of drawings M.O.: My Exhibition (M.O.: Mon Exposition) (1983) serves as a conceptual palimpsest to its self-referential MoMA namesake. Rarely is an audience afforded a behind-the-scenes look into the curatorial process of an exhibition they are currently visiting. Displayed in a gallery that hinges the show’s two halves, the panel of drawings features many of the works in previous and upcoming rooms. The curators sourced the framework for Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition from this meticulous catalogue of Oppenheim’s works, methodically organized by the artist herself in advance of an earlier retrospective at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1984.2 This crucial centerpiece provides grounds to assert the prolific nature of her career not only through the sheer number of works recorded, but also through the process of having to consider them together as a whole. Crafting this archival method into a singular artwork activates the medium’s inherent multiplicity to unify Oppenheim’s expansive oeuvre, while also cementing her legacy to ensure she never again be recognized for just one singular achievement, but rather for her larger idiosyncratic eye for manipulating material into boundless imaginative new forms.

Tatiana Marcel is an MA student at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Latin American art, Dada, and Surrealism, with a focus on Latin American Surrealism. At the Institute, she co-curated the exhibition Feliciano Centurión: Telas y Textos and co-organized the Seventh Annual Symposium of Latin American Art: “Making Space, Making Place: Marking the Americas.” Prior to her graduate studies at the Institute, Tatiana worked at David Zwirner as an Artist Liaison and Sales Assistant to the Senior Partner. She received a BA in Art History and Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University. During college, she held positions at Christie’s and Gagosian.