Méret Oppenheim, Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure), Paris, 1936,
Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon, cup 4-3/8 inches in diameter; saucer 9-3/8 inches in diameter; spoon 8 inches long, overall height 2-7/8" (The Museum of Modern Art)
Méret Oppenheim - written by Sue-Na Gay
In trying to elicit the many works that have inspired my interest in art over the years, I was brought back to a work that has intrigued me since childhood.
My mind wandered back to a bookcase in my childhood home which held an aging set of vintage children’s encyclopedia. Rather than the traditional A-Z, the books covered a range of topics from dogs to science, including a singular volume on art. I can no longer remember what else the set included or even what the rest of that particular volume featured but I can still very vividly recall my interest in one very specific image, that of a furry teacup and saucer – or what I now know to be a picture of Méret Oppenheim’s Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure).
As seminal work of the Surrealist movement the work was created as a sort of visual pun or disturbance. Rumored (perhaps apocryphally) to have been created after a casual conversation between Oppenheim, Picasso and Dora Maar in which they joked that perhaps ‘anything could be covered in fur’, ‘even [a] cup and saucer’, Object fascinates, confounds, delights and disgusts in alternating waves. It is at once tactile in its allure and yet pragmatically useless in its form.
I was drawn in simply by the appeal of its bizarre nature – an object that seemingly doesn’t make sense in its existence but exists nonetheless. And therein lies the appeal of art for me as a whole, the never-ending expanse of unknown potentialities.
It should be noted that Andre Breton re-named the work after it’s creation to Le Déjeuner en fourrure (Luncheon in Fur) giving reference to both Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, while also providing implicit nods to the popular Freudian interpretations of the time. But even without the added sexual undertones, the visceral impact of the work remains. In true Surrealist fashion it upends expectations and pushes the boundaries of what is commonly acceptable or ‘real’.