Over the course of her protean career, Meret Oppenheim produced witty, unconventional bodies of work that defy neat categorizations of medium, style and subject matter. ?Nobody will give you freedom,? she stated in 1975, ?you have to take it.? Her freewheeling, subversively humorous approach modeled a dynamic artistic practice in constant flux, yet held together by the singularity and force of her creative vision.0Published in conjunction with the first ever major transatlantic Meret Oppenheim retrospective, and the first in the United States in over 25 years, this publication surveys work from the radically open Swiss artist?s precocious debut in 1930s Paris, the period during which her notorious fur-lined Object in MoMA?s collection was made, through her post?World War II artistic development, which included engagements with international Pop, Nouveau Réalisme and Conceptual art, and up to her death in 1985. Essays by curators from the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Menil Collection and the Museum of Modern Art critically examine the artist?s wide-ranging, wildly imaginative body of work, and her active role in shaping the narrative of her life and art, providing the context for her creative production pre? and post?World War II.00Exhibition: Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (22.10.2021-30.01.2022) / The Menil Collection, Houston, USA (11.03-07.08.2022) / The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (02.10.2022-05.02.2023).

Nine essays that explore key elements of Oppenheim's art and shed new light on defining aspects of her life and career. Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) is far more than just the creator of the iconic fur teacup. In the course of her career, she produced a complex, wide-ranging, and enigmatic body of work that has no parallel in modern art. Like an x-ray beam, this book scans Oppenheim's artistic oeuvre, bringing its variety, playfulness, and poetry to the fore. Instead of simply answering the riddles posed by these intriguing works, it maps out the paths that will lead us to still more clues. Simon Baur is a leading expert in the life and art of Meret Oppenheim. The nine new essays featured in this volume are at once scholarly and easy to read. In them, Baur shares the many fascinating insights and interpretations that he has gleaned from his decades-long engagement with Oppenheim's work. The result is an anthology that combines both biographical and thematic aspects and takes us on an exciting journey into the poetic cosmos of a truly great female artist.

Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) is one of the twentieth century's most important and unconventional artists. Her multifaceted, independent oeuvre includes painting, sculpture, poetry, and design. The publication illuminates her diverse body of work in an international context and demonstrates the remarkable influence this fascinating personality had on later generations of artists, for instance, as a feminist role model.

One of the most unusual women of the twentieth century, Meret Oppenheim most famously created the legendary Le Déjeuner en Fourrure, her 1936 assemblage of a tea cup and a fur. But Oppenheim was not just a Surrealist mouthful--though she provided the movement with one of its most recognizable symbols. Like her counterparts Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton and Man Ray, she used found materials freely in her artworks, often to the point of creating a critical alienation of the viewer from an otherwise familiar object. Her greater oeuvre has often been subsumed by the dominance of the ubiquitous fur cup, a situation which this publication aims to remedy, presenting a career-spanning selection of witty drawings, paintings, objects, collages, poems and designs for "applied artworks"--fantastic clothes, jewelry and furniture. Shortly before her death, Oppenheim and editor Thomas Levy developed the idea of realizing some of her applied artworks; those that were made to appear here through photo documentation. Also included are scholarly essays, an exhibition list, a bibliography and a filmography.

Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) is one of the most recognized twentieth-century artists: an almost legendary figure able to stand out on a mainly male-dominated Surrealist art scene while developing her own highly personal artistic practice. This catalogue presents her entire career, from the 1930s to her late works. It thus reveals the intense personal and creative network of relationships she nurtured with her older and often already famous peers during her time in Paris: Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Hans Arp and others are also documented in this publication through some of their most significant works. What emerges, above all, is the extent to which the artist influenced, thanks to her personality and allure, the Surrealist vocabulary in which objects turn into fetishes, oneiric and erotic fantasies intermingle, and women are seen as innocent or evil, enveloped in mysterious nature. After the war, Meret Oppenheim conducted her investigations - ranging from figurativism to abstraction, from assemblage to painting - while eluding all attempts at categorization. Her creative freedom and the extraordinary evocative power of her works have made her a key figure for many generations of artists, as can be seen here through parallels with creations by Daniel Spoerri, Birgit J�rgenssen, Robert Gober and Mona Hatoum.

In 1936, invited by André Breton to contribute to an exhibition of Surrealist objects, Meret Oppenheim decided to act upon a café conversation she had recently had with Pablo Picasso and his then-companion Dora Maar. Commenting on a fur-covered bracelet that Oppenheim had made for the designer Schiaparelli, Picasso remarked that one could cover just about anything in fur, to which Oppenheim had responded, 'Even this cup and saucer.' The resulting sculpture was Object, a teacup, saucer and spoon purchased from a department store and lined with Chinese gazelle fur. In this volume of the MoMA One on One series, an essay by Carolyn Lanchner, a former curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA, explores the subversive nature of this sensual yet disturbing work, which simultaneously attracts and repels the viewer, and of the dreamlike world of Surrealism in which Oppenheim worked.