Meret Oppenheim Biography
Meret Oppenheim was born on 6 October 1913 in Charlottenburg, today in the heart of the German capital and until 1920 an autonomous city. His father was a doctor from Hamburg, Erich Alphons. His mother, Eva Wenger, was Swiss. His unusual name, Meret, came from the episode Meretlein of the novel Grünen Heinrich by the Swiss writer, poet and painter Gottfried Keller. Meret, as well as an artist, would also have been a poet. He had an excellent education, partly linked to the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, and immediately demonstrated a particular predisposition for drawing, history and German. His grandmother, Lisa Wenger, had already attended the Art Academy in Düsseldorf, and had become a painter and author of children's books. This allowed Meret to quickly come into contact with artistic and literary circles and, in particular, with the writer Herman Hesse, to whom her aunt Ruth Wenger had been married for a few years. Despite her love for Goethe and Rilke, however, in 1931, the young Oppenheim decided to become an artist. In 1933 he left for Paris together with another Swiss painter and friend, Irène Zurkinden. And there he met Alberto Giacometti and Hans Arp. In some way his success began with Alberto's ear: the first work by Meret that had resonance was entitled Giacometti's ear. The artist was 20 years old at the time. Giacometti and Arp invited her to exhibit, again in 1933, at the Salon des Surindependentes. From that moment he was part of the surrealist group. In reality, apart from the discrimination that even avant-garde artists reserved for women, the attempts to isolate them and exclude them from exhibitions, to always make them feel a little different, Meret was, due to her training and imagination, already a "case" apart . He loved psychoanalysis. She liked Klee, Modigliani, Matisse, the first Picasso. But he always chose impervious and very personal paths. Like when, at 16, he wrote down the equation X = rabbit on the cover of a notebook. André Breton liked the writing so much that he wanted it as a gift. She was restless and transgressive: just think of how she was photographed by Man Ray in 1934. Naked, in front of the press. Or while reading in bed, with her pubic hair in the foreground. The turning point came in 1936, when he invented the fur-covered cup and named it Fur Breakfast. The Museum of Modern Art in New York bought it immediately, for a price of 250 euros. In spite of all the bizarre ideas produced by his colleagues, it has remained the symbolic work of surrealism. The same year he “hogtied” a pair of women's shoes on a tray, making them look like a baked chicken, and titled them My Nanny. Irony. But also a spectacular ability to understand which artistic provocations would have gone beyond the simple threshold of "scandal" and would have established themselves as guiding ideas. My nanny was also the cause of a clash with Max Ernst's wife, Marie Berthe. Who asked for a divorce. Not because Ernst had procured the shoes from Oppenheim. But because Meret and Max, who had met at a party in Kurt Seligmann's studio, were lovers: it was the straw that broke the camel's back. Although a year later, fearing that her relationship with Ernst, much older than her, would stifle her artistic streak, Meret left him. For her, any crisis of creativity was a serious problem, which is why she also dedicated herself to the design of furniture, clothes and jewellery: since 1936 the Nazis had blocked the business of her father, of Jewish origins, and the family, previously wealthy, she had found herself in difficulty. Despite the need to work, however, and the importance of being able to exhibit with other artists (she remained linked to the surrealists until 1937) Meret did not give up her ideas and controversies. He couldn't stand, for example, having too erotic an interpretation of his inventions. Which were also often truly transgressive, like Spring Festival, the lunch-performance organized at his home on the naked body of a model. Meret felt misunderstood. In 1936 she managed to organize her first solo show, at the Schulthess gallery in Basel. The following year he returned to settle in the Swiss city and for two years he attended the school of applied arts. Meanwhile he continued to work, even though he often destroyed or left his projects unfinished. He was in contact with the Group 33, which opposed both fascism and the conservative tendencies of Swiss art. And he took part in the Allianz exhibition, another association of Swiss artists. In 1938 he visited Northern Italy with Leonor Fini and André Peyre de Mandiargues. In 1939 he returned to Paris to participate in an exhibition on “fantastic” furniture featuring, among others, Max Ernst and Leonor Fini. On that occasion he presented some objects and the famous table with bird's legs. In 1949 she married Wolfgang La Roche with whom she lived until his death in Bern in 1967. In the meantime Meret had overcome a profound artistic crisis. In 1958 he resumed working at full speed: by the Seventies he was now a living icon. She died on 15 November 1885, the day of the presentation of her book of poems which she illustrated, Caroline, dedicated to Karoline von Günderode, the great German poet (1780-1806) who committed suicide out of love.
