Listening to Art, by William Denton.
Volume six, number twelve: Object by Meret Oppenheim.
Hello, and welcome to Listening to Art. I’m William Denton.
I quote the entry on Meret Oppenheim in An Illustrated Dictionary of Surrealism by José Pierre, translated by W.J. Strachan (where Déjeuner en fourrure is another name for Object):
Oppenheim Meret (Berlin 1913). She joined the surrealists at the age of eighteen, became their good fairy, and the object of some of Man Ray’s most beautiful photographs. In 1936, turning her back on her previous charming but hesitant works, she won immediate fame with her first surrealist object the Déjeuner en fourrure. Subsequently she was to construct other objects no less remarkable and attractive but refused to limit the scope of her production and aimed at a kind of allusive and pared-down painting. Her sculpture shows more imagination. Finally Meret Oppenheim organized a “Banquet” on a nude woman with a gilded face at the International Exhibition of Surrealism of 1959 in Paris.
This is a sculpture, made of fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon, fitting in a volume roughly 30 cm wide, 8 cm high and 25 cm deep.
Now let’s listen to Object by Meret Oppenheim, recorded at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, on 16 May 2017.
That was Object by Meret Oppenheim. I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I did.
For more information and links to things I’ve mentioned, please visit listeningtoart.org.
Listening to Art is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Bibliography
All web sites accessed as of date of publication.
Museum of Modern Art. “Meret Oppenheim. Object. Paris, 1936.” Museum of Modern Art. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80997.
Pierre, José. An Illustrated Dictionary of Surrealism. Translated by W.J. Strachan. Woodbury NY: Barron’s, 1979.
Wikipedia, s.v. “Meret Oppenheim,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meret_Oppenheim.
⸻, s.v. “Le Déjeuner en fourrure,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Déjeuner_en_fourrure.