Meret Oppenheim: Beyond
While still a teenager, Meret Oppenheim completed a simple ink drawing called Suicides’ Institute, one of the earliest pieces in a compact retrospective of the artist’s work now at the Museum of Contemporary Art. A young boy holding a ball observes a row of four people with nooses around their necks. Three of the figures are presumably dead; the fourth–about to kick away the support from under his feet–points upward, directing the boy’s attention to one of the nooses.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
That Oppenheim shared the surrealists’ interest in stripping objects of their functionality–“to hound the mad beast of function,” in Andre Breton’s words–can be seen in her drawings for jewelry and clothing. The displacement in these precisely rendered images can be creepy. Design for Necklace (1936) drapes the legs of a girl around a woman’s neck. The legs have carefully drawn socks; shiny black shoes reflect light. The “buttons” in Design for Buttons for Evening Jacket (1942-’45) consist of three dinner plates, each with fork and knife at its side. Oppenheim made several designs for gloves in the 30s and 40s that revealed the bones or blood vessels within the hand; for the Pair of Gloves that she finally had fabricated in 1985, the year of her death, she silk-screened bright red arteries–their multiple branches resembling the veins of a leaf–over gray suede. The gloves violate the whole concept of fashion, which aims to hide our animal bodies and to make us into products of culture. Oppenheim’s detailed design, with its sharp-edged tangle of tiny vessels, contradicts the suede’s smoothness, hinting at the beast within.
There’s a phallic quality not only to traditional sculpture but to traditional (and modernist) tableware–precise, hard-edged forms that assert themselves, piercing space. Oppenheim’s covering of cup, saucer, and spoon makes hard edges fuzzy and replaces firm surfaces with a sensual, pliable layer that yields to the touch. This fur seems, when combined with the three concave shapes, almost perversely recessive; suggesting an undelineated vulva, it invites the viewer in.
She increasingly turned toward abstraction in her paintings and drawings. In the crayon drawing Sun in Evening Clouds (1963), for example, a solid white circle in the center represents the sun; the clouds are reddish abstract diamonds. If the white disk lacks the spiritual luminosity of the sunlight in, say, a 19th-century romantic painting or a work by Vermeer, it’s because Oppenheim’s skills, like most of the surrealists’, were not quite up to those of the old masters. As a result, her objects are often stronger than her paintings and drawings. But with their simple colors and abstracted forms, the drawings and paintings seem meant to invoke the spiritual, the idea of a realm of experience beyond language that was so central to the work of Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian.
