Memories of Meret

Text from the catalogue

Ragnar von Holten

In the middle of April 1967, Moderna Museet in Stockholm organised Meret Oppenheim’s first major retrospective exhibition. The catalogue featured a complete list of her existing works – drawings, paintings, collages, objects and sculptures. The artist was 54 at the time, and radiantly beautiful – unusually lively, spontaneous and witty. She was exceedingly curious and excited to see how her exhibition would be received. It had been organised by Pontus Hultén, Mette Prawitz and Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, the latter of whom had also created the cover for the catalogue and the poster. (I was not personally involved in creating the exhibition, but had lent a few objects that she had given me when we became friends in the early 1960s in Paris. But more on that later!)

To those few who knew of Meret Oppenheim in Sweden, she was something of a legend, on account of her “fur breakfast”, an object that had belonged to the Museum of Modern Art in New York since shortly after its conception in the mid-1930s. However, the early and prolific production of objects was relatively unknown in Sweden, where we were used to thinking in terms of a direct line of development from Marcel Duchamp’s dada objets trouvés/ready mades to the assemblages and combines by the contemporary Americans Rauschenberg, Oldenburg and Jasper Johns. This perception had been perpetuated not least by art critics, and the surrealist objects were virtually unknown in this country – that is, the objects of Man Ray, Giacometti, Picasso, Dalí, Joseph Cornell, Magritte, Miró, Max Ernst and Meret Oppenheim. (The concept of the surrealist object had originally been formulated by André Breton.)

Meret came into contact with the surrealists at a very early age – when she was still in her twenties! – and Giacometti and Arp in particular encouraged and supported her from the start. She had a long relationship with Max Ernst, and he has written somewhere, “Woman is a sandwich spread with white marble.” Many of Oppenheim’s small sketches date from this period, objects that she was not able to produce in full scale and final materials (for economic reasons) until the 1950s.

While the exhibition was on, Meret and I went to the Storkyrkan church to look at Bernt Notke’s monument of Saint George and the dragon, because I wanted to show her the wooden dragon’s wings made of real elk antlers! There and then we declared this mediaeval sculpture the first assemblage in art history – even if its mediaeval artist was unaware of this distinction for obvious reasons.

My lasting memory of the opening refers to an object that Meret had made especially (?) for this exhibition. Her works were shown in the Small Cinema at the end of the first museum hall, which was reached via a staircase. The first thing visitors encountered was a large drinks table. In the doorway to the actual exhibition was Meret Oppenheim herself, welcoming visitors and shaking hands with them. Many guests took her hand delightedly – only to recoil! This “Opening Object” turned out to be an almost invisible glove with the fingers cut off and the palm covered with bristles that must have made the handshake feel surprisingly unpleasant! Meret Oppenheim is often quoted to have said, “Freedom is something you take, you never get it for free!”

The exhibition comprised some 50 works, mainly objects, and the pièce de resistance was undoubtedly the fur-covered teacup. All the critics made it the main focus of their articles, and Ulf Linde and Beate Sydhoff were no exceptions. The latter described it in a brilliantly dadaist manner: “Naturally, it was important to keep the tea from going cold.” “Seeing her teacup at the Moderna Museet exhibition, her fame appears perfectly understandable,” writes Ulf Linde. “It is an exceedingly remarkable object.”

And he adds: “Her objects are never speculative. They are simple, striking – visions perceived on the periphery of consciousness; sometimes in dreams, sometimes in waking. But the visions have always been imperative for her. They have demanded to be materialised. This is also true of the sculptures she has modelled by hand. They, also, appear to be reproductions of forms that were revealed complete in every detail to her “inner eye”; a sharp dividing line runs between idea and materialisation in everything she does – and that is the reason why her ideas are always perceived as something separate. She draws like a fifteen-year-old doodling dresses in her school books – but the idea shines through the drawing, as if it were completely independent of it.”

Thus, it is Meret Oppenheim’s character of medium that Linde emphasises, and consequently he gave his article the heading “Gifts from a medium”. Ulf Linde’s text in Dagens Nyheter is undeniably one of the most important Swedish analyses of her contribution as an artist.

The emphasis of the exhibition was on Oppenheim’s objects and sculptures, and alongside them her two-dimensional work appeared pale. The original for the object Ma gouvernante – my nurse – mein Kindermädchen – two white shoes trussed together with paper frills on the heels – was a contemporary of Fur Breakfast, but had long since been destroyed. Meret made a replica for the exhibition, and this was immediately added to the Moderna Museet collection. Her bird table from the late 1930s is another “classic” object – as well as being a parlour inventory: two rickety bronze bird’s legs with great talons support a tabletop traversed by the tracks from innumerable birds’ feet! And, finally, The Couple – two black lace-up shoes with the toes cut off, joined together into “Siamese twins”. In a radio interview I made with Meret she talks about them. Her idea was that the shoes had been put out in the hotel corridor to be polished (as one did with shoes in those days). In the night, they “fell in love and mated”, she explained matter-of-factly.

And what impression did the exhibition make? With the exception of the two reviews mentioned, it was regarded as an oddity, a “game”, or “an event of the revealing and thought-provoking kind showing how art occasionally seems to consist of the art of being called art”, as one critic joked, while another claimed that her “anecdotes” often included “an element of unpleasantness”. Her sense of humour was obviously too subtle for Sweden. Critics focused on the inconsistent quality, that the artist was bad at drawing, and so on. And marvelled that Meret “who had been a legend for so long” was actually alive – in other words, no particularly serious comments. When you consider all the works Moderna Museet has shown over the years, such as American contemporary art, “movement in art” and so on, this reaction is both surprising and provincial.

I got to know Meret Oppenheim in Paris in the spring of 1961. It was at the surrealist café (which at that time bore the poetic name of La Proménade de Vénus). My book on the symbolist artist Gustave Moreau had just been published, with a preface by André Breton, and I had been invited to organise a Moreau exhibition at the Louvre. During a discussion at the café Meret asked me to take her to the Louvre and show her the exhibition. After that, we met quite frequently, and she visited my studio at the Swedish students’ hostel to see my own collages; she was particularly fond of one of them, which I of course gave her. A few months later in Stockholm, I got a small letter from her saying that she had made an object for me that would be arriving shortly by post! The object, In Memory of the Poet – an “abstract death-mask” surrounded by a wreathlike photo frame – is both magical and evocative. I thanked her and told her how pleased I was, and she replied that she was very pleased with it too. In fact, she had had to “tear it from her heart”. I met Meret a few more times, in Paris, occasionally together with the surrealist painter Toyen, who was her close friend. And we corresponded about the surrealist exhibition in Stockholm in 1970, agreeing that she would be represented by her shoe objects, The Couple and Moderna Museet’s Ma gouvernante – my nurse – mein Kindermädchen.

The last time I saw her was in the early 1980s, when we bumped into one another in a bar in the Quartier Latin in the early hours of the morning. She insisted that I try a drink she had formerly instinctively avoided but which she now found delightful: the Mimosa, champagne with orange juice! It was better than its reputation, and we had a few glasses. Meret was in high spirits, dressed in bleached jeans and a woolly Iceland jumper matching her cropped white hair. I recall one of her lines: “You know, I’m completely deaf in one ear. Sometimes I forget which ear it is. It’s exciting, both for me and the people around me!”

She was about 70 at the time. A few years later she was dead.