MERET OPPENHEIM

Berlin, Germany, 1913 — Basel, Switzerland, 1985

Born in Berlin into a liberal intellectual milieu shaped by psychoanalytic inquiry — her grandmother was the pioneering psychoanalyst Lisa Wenger — Oppenheim arrived in Paris in 1932 at eighteen and rapidly entered the orbit of Breton, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and Picasso, while still maintaining a deliberate independence from Surrealist dogma. As she stated in her landmark 1975 Basel Art Prize speech: "Nobody will give you freedom. You have to take it." Recent scholarship has repositioned Oppenheim not as a peripheral muse but as a conceptual innovator who critically engaged — and at times subverted — the movement's gendered dynamics.

Her iconic Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure) (1936), which she conceived in dialogue with Picasso and Dora Maar at the Café de Flore, remains a touchstone of twentieth-century art. Its unsettling fusion of domestic object and animal pelt disrupts the boundaries between desire and repulsion, utility and fetish; MoMA's purchase of the work that year, for just fifty dollars, made it the museum's first acquisition by a woman artist. Object appeared in Guggenheim's Exhibition by 31 Women (1943) — one of its rare public showings before MoMA fully integrated it into its permanent collection galleries in 1963. Oppenheim's own ambivalence about its canonization was made explicit in her 1972 ironic remake, Souvenir of the Lunch in Fur — a kitsch recreation in cheap materials that indicates the fetishization of the original. This work is held in The 31 Women Collection and was exhibited in 31 Mujeres at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid (2024–25) and 31 Mulheres at MAC/CCB, Lisbon (2025).

Her return to Switzerland precipitated a creative crisis lasting nearly two decades, yet her resurgence in the mid-1950s marked her decisive expansion across media, articulating what she termed an "androgynous spirit" that rejected binary constructions of gender and authorship. This aspect of her philosophy has recently gained renewed institutional attention. The major transatlantic retrospective Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition, co-organized by Kunstmuseum Bern, The Menil Collection Houston, and MoMA (2021–23), brought nearly 200 works together — Oppenheim’s first comprehensive survey in the United States — and a follow-up exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Basel in June 2025 confirmed the sustained urgency of her critical reassessment.

Work by Meret Oppenheim is maintained as part of the 31 Women Collection to preserve the legacy of the first all-women's exhibition in the United States on record and to maintain Oppenheim's contributions in the record of art history.