Man Ray: The Artist and His Shadows by Arthur Lubow

Author:Arthur Lubow [Lubow, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Artists; Architects; Photographers, Jewish, art, history, Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945)
ISBN: 9780300262766
Google: qiQ7EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021-09-14T00:24:23.050523+00:00

11

Meret Oppenheim

MERET OPPENHEIM’S innovative and productive artistic career spanned half a century, yet she is primarily known for two things: a cup, saucer, and spoon she covered with fur, and a series of photographs by Man Ray for which she modeled in the nude. Surrealism at its best, these works are sexy and witty, and so they have overshadowed her other achievements. Man Ray helped perpetuate that reductive misconception. When he discussed her (briefly) in his memoir, he recalled only these two accomplishments, and both played second fiddle in his mind to the glorious cadenza of her sexual liberation. Oppenheim, he declared, was “one of the most uninhibited women I have ever met.”1

She had come to Paris, like so many others, in search of freedom, arriving in May 1932, at age eighteen, in the company of a slightly older female friend. She went home to Switzerland after a few months but returned in the fall, determined this time to stay. Unlike Man Ray, for whom Paris became a permanent, congenial home, Oppenheim sojourned there for a few years without laying down roots. She would spend most of her life in Switzerland, although it might be argued that she never truly settled there, either. She was temperamentally unsettled.

Oppenheim was born in Berlin ten months before the outbreak of World War I, and spent the war years with her mother in the home of her Swiss maternal grandparents in Bern canton. After the war, her father, a German-Jewish doctor who had been drafted into the army, established a medical practice in southern Germany and brought his family there. Meret continued to spend much time in Switzerland, where she was deeply influenced by her grandmother, a prominent children’s book illustrator and feminist.

Her biographers marvel at how fitting was her unusual first name. Meretlein is a child-witch in a nineteenth-century classic Bildungsroman, Green Henry—a beautiful, wild girl who prizes freedom above all else. That was true of Meret, too, who dropped out of high school in Basel, intent on becoming an artist. Once in Paris, she only erratically attended her drawing classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She was a poet as well as a visual artist, and, much like Man Ray, she valued the concept of an artwork over its technical execution. She pursued her education in the cafés, not in the academies.

There was an established and insular colony of Swiss expatriates living in Paris since the end of World War I. Oppenheim chose not to congregate with them. In this regard, too, she was like Man Ray. She arrived in the city speaking no French and yet wanted to associate with natives. Nonetheless, one of the first artists she met, at the Dôme, was her Swiss compatriot Giacometti, who also avoided fraternizing with most of the other Swiss artists in Paris. She developed a passionate crush on him, which was not reciprocated, and their relationship remained platonic. But a good friend of Giacometti—the handsome Max Ernst, who had romanced Gala Éluard before she eloped with Dalí—fell for her.

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