Born in Berlin in 1913,Oppenheim passed
her childhood in Switzerland and southern Germany where her father, a doctor
long interested in Jung’s ideas, had a country medical practice. Her aunt had
at one time been married to Herman Hesse; her grandmother had studied painting
in Dusseldorf in the 1880s and later became well known as a writer of novels
and children’s stories and as an activist in the Swiss League for Women’s
Rights. Oppenheim took the latter’s example to heart, decided at an early age
not to marry at all or at least not until later in life, and began hiding a
sketchbook inside her hymnal during long and tedious church services.
At sixteen, stimulated by an exhibition of Bauhaus work at
the Basel Kunsthalle that included the number paintings of Paul Klee, she
produced her first “surrealist” work, an equation between X and a drawing of a
rabbit in a school notebook. She wouki later present this first Cahier d’une Ecoliere to
the Surrealist leader, Andre Breton. Leaving school the following year,
Oppenheim met some of the artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit and began making pen
and ink watercolors, many of which have an air of expressive caricature not
unlike that of Klee’s early etchings.
She arrived in Paris in May 1932, rented a room at the Hotel
Odessa in Montparnasse, and enrolled briefly at the Academic de la Grande
Chaumiere. Soon bored by the academic routine at the academy, she began to
spend her days in galleries and cafes, writing her first poems in the Cafe du
Dome where she met Giacomettiin 1933. Through him she met Sophie Taeuber and
Hans Arp, Kurt Seligmannand Max Ernst . Giacometti and Arp became her
first artistic mentors; Ernst and Man
Ray her intimate companions.
Giacometti, who was earning a living making furniture and
objects, encouraged her to make her first Surrealist object, a small piece
titled Giacometti’s Ear (1933).
He andArp invited her to exhibit with them at the Salon des Surindependents in
1933; after that she frequented Surrealist meetings and gatherings,
increasingly identifying her life and her art with the movement.
Her youth and beauty, her free spirit and uninhibited
behavior, her precarious walks on the ledges of high buildings, and the
“surrealist” food she concocted from marzipan in her studio, all contributed to
the creation of an image of the Surrealist woman as beautiful, independent, and
creative. But this public persona was of little help, in fact was almost
certainly a hindrance, in her search for artistic maturity. The objects that
insured her place in subsequent histories of the movement offer flashes of
brilliance rather than evidence of sustained artistic growth, and she was, even
at that time, conflicted and uncertain about her life as an artist.
She had been named after the Meretlein or “Little Meret” of
Gottfried Keller’s storyGreen
Henry. Participated in Surrealist meetings and exhibitions until
1937 and again, more sporadically, after the war until shortly before Breton’s
death in 1966.
Her fur-lined teacup, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, in 1937, was chosen by visitors to the exhibition as the
quintessential Surrealist symbol. Oppenheim’s return to Basel in 1937 marked
the beginning of an eighteen-year period of artistic crisis and redirection. In
1939 she took part in an exhibition of fantastic furniture with Leonor
Fini, Max Ernst, and others at the Galerie Rene
Druin and Leo Castelli in Paris.
A major retrospective of her work was organized by the
Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1967. For the latter part of her life, lived and
worked in Berne and Paris.
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