Méret Oppenheim at MoMA review — provocative but patchy show for Swiss surrealist

Towards the end of her life, Méret Oppenheim begged interviewers to stop asking about the furry teacup. That single work, produced in a burst of youthful inspiration in the 1930s, came to define her career and, five decades later, she was sick of it. Over the course of her life, a wry, intelligent spirit poked up now and then between stretches of banality, depression and creative blockage, but never decisively enough to distract from the surrealist novelty item “Object: Le Déjeuner en Fourrure” (“Object: Lunch in Fur”).

Oppenheim deserves to be known for more of her work — though perhaps not quite so much more as MoMA’s belated blockbuster would have us believe. Crammed with nearly 200 pieces, the New York retrospective bombards us with so much of her uneven output that it winds up undermining her legacy. It’s a common curatorial dilemma: whether to present a selective and flattering view of a mostly unknown artist or go for comprehensiveness and let the public pick the hits. In this case, the organisers from three separate institutions — Anne Umland (MoMA), Nina Zimmer (Kunstmuseum Bern) and Natalie Dupêcher (The Menil Collection) — might have done their subject a service with some more vigorous editing.

Born in Germany, Oppenheim grew up in Switzerland and was drawn to Paris. That’s where she found herself in 1936, a 23-year-old aspiring surrealist, when she met Picasso and his mistress, the artist Dora Maar, at the Café de Flore. The couple admired her fur-covered bracelet and mused that anything could be made over that way — even, Oppenheim joked, “this cup”. Later, when André Breton asked her to take part in an exhibition of surrealist objects, she immediately purchased a cheap porcelain teacup, saucer and spoon, and dressed them up in “a bit of fur that I had purchased once at random”. Within the year, “Object” had crossed the Atlantic and been included in “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism”, the path-breaking exhibition that Alfred Barr mounted at MoMA.

The popular press found the fur cup irresistible (or irresistibly repulsive) and made its image ubiquitous. “The tension and excitement caused by this object in the minds of tens of thousands of Americans have been expressed in rage, laughter, disgust or delight,” Barr remarked. MoMA bought it, the first surrealist work to enter the museum’s collection.

For a few years, that breakthrough fuelled Oppenheim’s subversive inspiration, as she subjected the trappings of femininity to gleefully sinister overtones. “Ma Gouvernante — My Nurse — Mein Kindermädchen” reads like a cannibalistic revenge fantasy aimed at an overbearing governess. A pair of white pumps is trussed together like a chicken on a silver platter, with the turned-up soles where the breasts should be and the high heels, doubling as drumsticks, garnished in frilly paper booties. In “Fur Gloves with Wooden Fingers”, manicured red fingernails emerge, claw-like, from severed paws. Beauty is beast, and beast, beauty. Oppenheim fights back against womanhood’s constraints with knife-edged wit and an irascible cackle.

As fascism closed in, she moved back to Basel in 1937 and spent the war years protected from mass violence, but not from isolation and depression. Sassiness succumbed to self-pity, which she expressed in paintings of ghostly rabbits and floating princesses. The long, painful drought lasted into the mid-1950s.

She eventually bounced back, many times. Paintings, collages, drawings, sculptures, assemblages — she produced them all, careering through a range of styles and switching from figuration to abstraction and back again. “I simply always did what I felt like doing, anything else wouldn’t agree with the way I work. Committing to a particular style would’ve bored me to death,” she explained. The price she paid for that freedom was a reputation that remained stuck to that old cup like a burr on Velcro.

She continued to work in sporadic rhythms and in a dour mode, but finally recovered her wit in the early 1960s, when she collected bits of elaborate vintage craftsmanship and banged them into something new. In “Animal Headed Demon”, a wedge-shaped block of wood protrudes like a beak from the mouth of a carved clock case, giving the apparatus a ferocious vitality. In “Miss Gardenia”, a fussy gilt frame encloses a plaster surface that swells through the picture plane, as if a tumescent organ were trapped beneath the surface.

Her taste for provocative juxtaposition found another exciting outlet in collage. Two peacock feathers play the role of a woman’s eyes in “Mask” (1971), and a yellow spider crawls from (or into) her mouth. Set against a frame of fake-wood-grain paper, the face looks at once human and monstrous, sexual and dead — a creature of intricate nightmares.

“Face-Insect” (1975) is another schematic visage that morphs even as you look at it. Inside a weathered-wood frame, a wax wedge represents a nose; green feathers connote bushy eyebrows. Gradually, though, the composition gels into a flying pyramid, then a winged bug or a mystical symbol. Oppenheim is at her best when she confounds the eye and interferes with the brain’s desire to resolve an apparent impossibility.

Two years before she died in 1985, she prepared a template for a retrospective in Bern, drawing hundreds of her own works in miniature and specifying the order in which they should be hung. It was an astonishing exercise in retrospection. Armed with coloured pencil and ballpoint pen, she recapitulated her entire career in a dozen scroll-like sheets.

She saw what others would surely have missed. The auto-anthology includes “Suicides’ Institute”, a crude, bleakly funny ink drawing from 1931 in which three hanged figures dangle from meat hooks and a fourth man gets ready to follow. Still standing on his stool, the rope slack at his neck, he appears to be explaining the procedure to a small child holding a ball.

It’s hard to know why Oppenheim looked back across the decades to her teenaged self and chose to enshrine this morbid doodle, but her selection and organisation remains scripture. All these years later, MoMA has largely followed her lead, letting a long-dead artist dictate the way she should be remembered. MoMA’s show is called “Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition”, as if to cede responsibility to the subject. But few creative souls are as pitiless with themselves as curators often need to be. A little less obedience would have gone a long way.

To March 4 2023, moma.org