Wide-ranging Meret Oppenheim continues at MoMA through March 4 (photo by Jonathan Muzikar)
MERET OPPENHEIM: MY EXHIBITION
MoMA, Museum of Modern Art
The Robert B. Menschel Galleries, 3 East
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through March 4, $14-$25 (sixteen and under free)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
In a 2010 SWI video, Lisa Wenger, the niece of Meret Oppenheim, said of her aunt, the German-born Swiss artist who died in 1985 at the age of seventy-two, “Immediately bought by MoMA in New York, [Object] is the work that most people associate Meret Oppenheim with, in a way fantastic, because she was so young — she was, like, twenty-two or twenty-three when that happened — and on the other hand, it was her prison, and she very often would say, ‘Uch, god, this damn fur cup,’ when people reduced her as an artist to that work or wanted her to do just this type of work, but that fur-covered cup and saucer was certainly her trademark, and it still is an icon of surrealism.”
That “damn fur cup” is part of “Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition,” which continues at MoMA through March 4, but it is not the centerpiece. It is merely one of nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, sculptures, films, assemblages, reliefs, collages, jewelry design, and more on display. The pieces are so wide-ranging that it would at first be easy to assume it was a group show, but it’s all by Oppenheim, a surrealist and conceptualist who played by her own set of rules. As detailed in cocurator Nina Zimmer’s catalog essay, Oppenheim told television journalist Frank A. Meyer in 1983, when asked about whether she specifically tried to be uncategorizable, “Not at all! 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.”
Meret Oppenheim, Stone Woman (Steinfrau), oil on cardboard, 1938 (private collection)
Oppenheim did help to shape her legacy through twelve pencil, colored pencil, and ballpoint pen drawings, collectively titled M.O.: My Exhibition, that essentially lay out plans for a retrospective of her work. The MoMA show also includes the dark Suicides’ Institute, an ink in which a young boy looks up at four hanged people; the cartoonish One-Eyed and Sitting Figure with Folded Hands; the Surrealist Little Ghost Eating Bread and The Night, Its Volume and What Endangers It; Ma gouvernante – My Nurse – Mein Kindermädchen, a pair of high-heeled shoes on a platter, with the heels wrapped like lamb chop booties; Fur Gloves with Wooden Fingers; the somewhat abstract gouache Three Murderers in the Woods; the small circular wall piece The House at the Bridge; the geometric oil Sun-Bedecked Fields; the transformed clock Animal-headed Demon; the gelatin silver print X-Ray of M.O.’s Skull; and a ten-minute clip from Desire Caught by the Tail, the Pablo Picasso play for which Oppenheim designed costumes and sets for a 1956 production.
“Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition” celebrates legacy of German-born Swiss artist (photo by Jonathan Muzikar)
In a 1933 poem, Oppenheim wrote, “Finally! / Freedom!” The next year, in another poem, she declared, “Let the walls loose.”
That’s precisely the feeling one gets while experiencing “Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition.”