The Poetry and Art of Meret Oppenheim
Everyone Loses Everything

The Loveliest Vowel Empties: Collected Poems of Meret Oppenheim, translated by Kathleen Heil (World Poetry, 2023) £18.99; Mein Album/My Album, by Meret Oppenheim (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2022) £42

Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) might be best known for Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure), 1936, a fur-lined cup, saucer and spoon that can be found in the Surrealist Objects gallery on the fifth floor of MoMA, alongside work by Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Alberto Giacometti, Man Ray, Picasso and Remedios Varo.

Rethinking these everyday objects, Oppenheim created an objet d’art at once decadent and playful, indulgent and feral, beautiful and unusable. Imagine trying to take a sip, lips pressed against the cup’s lip. (Oppenheim pretends to do just that, in video footage, while setting up what would be her last exhibition, at Kunsthalle Bern, in 1984.) The furry service continues to provoke a delightful, some might say disgusting, synaesthetic response to art – the mouth feels dry just looking at it. But for Oppenheim it became something else: ‘There is one thing I do not want you to ask’, she said in 1978. ‘I have been asked so often. “How did you have the idea of the fur cup?” It bores me’.

In other of Oppenheim’s assemblages, white high heels are trussed together á la roast chicken and served on a silver platter (Ma Gouvernante – My Nurse – Mein Kindermädchen, 1936), wooden hands are manicured with red lacquer (Fur Gloves with Wooden Fingers, 1936), and laced leather boots connect amorphously at the toes (The ...