Meret Oppenheim: From Breakfast In Fur And Back Again

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.