Meret Oppenheim

Meret Oppenheim (Berlin, 1913 – Basel, 1985) was a compendium of contrasts: extravagant yet essential, simple yet bold, dreamlike yet grounded. Her art is a vibrant fusion of seemingly distant elements—a delicate balance between spontaneity and reflection, between dream and reality. Each of her works acts as a threshold to the unconscious, while remaining firmly rooted in a visceral, tangible dimension.

 

Born into a cultured and unconventional Swiss family, Oppenheim was exposed early on to Jungian thought, thanks to her grandmother, a close friend of Carl Gustav Jung. This psychoanalytic foundation nourished her symbolic and intuitive imagination from the start. At eighteen, she moved to Paris, briefly studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and quickly immersing herself in surrealist circles. She was soon noticed by figures like André Breton, Max Ernst, and Man Ray, who recognized her unique sensitivity and radical visual approach.

 

Though often labeled a surrealist “muse,” Oppenheim asserted her creative autonomy from the very beginning. Her most famous work, Le Déjeuner en fourrure (1936)—a teacup covered in fur—perfectly embodies her poetics: uncanny, sensual, playful, and deeply iconic. Acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as early as the late 1930s, this piece secured her a place in art history as one of the few women artists to gain recognition in her lifetime, within a still heavily male-dominated context.

 

After a period of artistic withdrawal in the 1940s—marked by an identity crisis and the need to break free from the expectations imposed on her by the art world—Oppenheim re-emerged in the 1950s with a renewed creative vigor. Her output became increasingly multifaceted: sculpture, drawing, poetry, and transformed everyday objects. Her recurring themes—metamorphosis, nature, feminine identity, and the dreamlike—were explored with a gaze that defied categorization.

 

Today, her works are held in and exhibited by leading museums and galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Kunsthalle Bern. The latter, in 1984, hosted a major retrospective conceived under Oppenheim’s own direction—an event that stands as a true declaration of intent: the definitive affirmation of a career lived in the name of freedom, beyond labels, genres, or stylistic confines.

Meret Oppenheim is now recognized as a key figure of Surrealism and 20th-century art. Her work continues to astonish with its vitality, its mystery, and its ability to reveal, through subtle gestures, the unexpected that resides within ordinary things.