February, 2008

Transcendent Androgyny: The Misunderstanding of Meret Oppenheim

It is ironic that Meret Oppenheim’s Le Dejeuner en Fourrure is the single universally known work by a European female Surrealist. Since its inclusion into the Museum of Modern Art collection in 1936, it has been held up as one of the most important works of Surrealist art. It remains the single exception to the rule of exclusion of women in scholarly and critical discourse around the Surrealist movement. Yet it is not a true representation of Oppenheim’s oeuvre. In fact, the circumstances surrounding its creation bring her very authorship into question. This paper will draw from essays and an interview with Oppenheim in Surrealism and Women by Gwen Raaberg, Renee Riese Hubert, and Robert J. Belton to support the notion that Oppenheim’s work is open to dual, if not multiple interpretations through the analysis of androgyny and Jungian thought that characterize her work.

In his essay, Speaking with Forked Tongues: “Male” Discourse in “Female” Surrealism? Belton comments on the ideologically patriarchal nature of the Surrealist doctrine. He argues that the most commonly held interpretations of the work of women artists are informed by a masculine understanding of the work. Like Raaberg and Hubert, he suggests the work of women Surrealists requires a dual interpretation. As we will see with an analysis of Oppenheim’s Le Dejeuner en Fourrure, the objectified and sexualized interpretation which dominates our understanding of Surrealist art can be reinterpreted from a more transcendent feminine perspective. We must be cautious, however, not to impose a postmodern feminist interpretation on work created in Europe between and immediately after the two World Wars. A pro- or proto-feminist understanding might color the work with our present day biases and awarenesses. Both Belton and Raaberg assert that we cannot ignore the historical and material conditions within which the work was formed. France in those days, viewed the role of women to be primarily a reproductive one, in order to repopulate a war-torn country.

Oppenheim, like other woman Surrealists, had to contend with a tendency within the movement to abuse women. Proto-Surrealist Isodore Dicasse’s statement “as beautiful as the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissection table, with its Freudian, aggressive, and violently sexual insinuations set down a pattern of sexual objectification and violence which was thereafter followed by the male Surrealists. She also had to contend with Surrealism’s indifference to the work of its female members. For all its claims to be a movement of social revolution, Surrealist society paralleled the patriarchal attitudes of society during the day. Andre Breton, states Raaberg, “had a way of praising their work without granting them autonomous powers” (2). Belton comments that “it is a sad fact that a great many of the women who participated in Surrealist exhibitions seem to have been allowed to do so precisely because they...were nicely packaged explosives” (52).

After Le Dejeuner en Fourrure, Oppenhiem is perhaps best known for her participation in Man Ray’s Erotique-voilee, a 1933 photograph that shows the very young artist posing nude with the wheel of a printing press, its handle carefully positioned to form the appearance of a phallus. In this work, Man Ray projected the typical masculine understanding of androgyny onto the artist. Though she denied ever playing femme-enfant to the Surrealist men, we see her here as the embodiment of their androgynous ideal. Masculine and feminine interpretations of androgyny differ wildly, as will be discussed below.

In a 1984 interview with Belton, Oppenhiem made clear that Breton imposed a masculine interpretation on Dejeuner en Fourrure which differs greatly from her own non-sexual understanding of the work. In fact, she raised questions about its very authorship in her claim that it was more Breton’s work than her own. Its very creation was something of a fluke, with the idea to line a teacup and saucer with fur arose from a bit of lighthearted banter with Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar about how anything could be covered in fur. While Oppenheim thought of it only in terms of the contrast of material textures, she made it according to Breton’s idea. When he renamed it Object, she felt that it was his title and creation, and stated that she saw herself only as the manufacturer. Breton saw the work as a sexualized object with its furry and concave cup acting as a female recipient to the phallic form of the spoon. This “resonated with sophomoric humor that male Surrealists found so endearing” (Belton, 53).

In all fairness, I do wonder how Oppenheim could not have seen the potential for sexual innuendo. I personally have two interpretations, a G-rated version that is about texture, the juxtaposition of conflicting ideas, and utter absurdity. A playful delight can be taken in imagining filling the furry cup with hot tea, then taking a sip which would fill one’s mouth with warm, wet fur. Of course, with the least bit of imagination, this same thought can easily lead to an R-rated understanding of the work, but I always understood it as an expression of a woman’s sexual pleasures, not a man’s. It truly is open to many interpretations, but was she not playing coy to have claimed she did not see a sexual side to the work?

The MOMA’s purchase of Object essentially determined her entire legacy by upholding it as quintessentially Surrealist. When asked about this, Oppenheim made clear that this one work did not clearly represent her true body of work. “That’s the Museum of Modern Art for you!” she quipped. For Oppenheim, the early recognition and misunderstanding that came along with the MOMA purchase sent her into a 17 year long spiral of depression and creative inactivity that she called her “Crisis Period.” Her surviving work from this period resembles, at least superficially, that of male Surrealists, but its interpretations reflect personal experience. Genevieve, 1942, and Femme Pierre, 1938, both make allusions to the broken female body. Genevieve converts two broken oars and a bit of wooden boat into an android figure. “My arms were broken, like the sculpture’s oars. I could do nothing. My arms weren’t actually broken, you understand, but the point I am making is that the idea is not Woman, but me, myself. It could easily have been a man” (72). Femme Pierre, an oil painting of a sleeping woman made of river stones is, as Oppenheim explained, prevented from action. Yet her legs are immersed in the living waters of the stream, suggesting movement and purification. She is not the ideal woman in a typical Surrealist sense, but a Jungian archetype that came to her in a dream.

Oppenheim turned to the writings of Carl Jung during her Crisis Period. This brought to her later work a sense of self-understanding as an androgynous being that transcended the masculine, Freudian interpretations of the androgyn. Rejecting conventional feminism, Oppenheim claimed that men and women were always equal in their brains. In her interview, she proposed that men should find the woman within themselves and that women find the masculine within them. While it is possible to interpret her work as a protest against the male misuse of women, her comments in this interview indicate that she more likely had transcended the very need for conventional feminism by searching for a Zen-like awareness of inner balance.

While I found many of her comments in this interview to be coy and noncommittal, Oppenheim did reveal an elevated understanding of the relations between the sexes that transcends both current feminist thought and male Surrealist ideology. Her words came across as a spiritually philosophical rather than critical or analytical. When asked if an untitled painting depicted a crucified phallus (in what may be seen from a contemporary standpoint as a form of feminist revenge), she demurred, stating that the elongated forms represented the serpent archetype, not a phallus. Conventional gender consciousness seems earthbound and myopic when compared to Oppenheim’s progressive emphasis on Jungian archetypes, while Freudianism seems downright primitive and puerile. Perhaps Oppenheim was aware of more than she let on, and was toying with her audience, playing a clever game to show how Jungian thought trumps the Freudian.
Oppenheim repeatedly claimed not to be a feminist. But I find it tempting to interpret as an act of conventional feminism her “reclamation” of Le Dejeuner en Fourrure when in the 1950s she made a serigraph from Man Ray’s 1936 photograph of Object. Having played the femme-enfant and muse to his creativity when she posed for Erotique-voilee and having been universally understood according to Breton’s interpretation of Le Dejeuner en Fourrur, it is easy to regard this act with a feminist sense of vindication. It is equally tempting to read into it a postmodern play on originality and appropriation. It is possible that Oppenheim was influenced by Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. If this is the case, her actions anticipate the Appropriation art movement of the 1980s. The fact that Le Dejeuner en Fourrure remains open to interpretations by way of later philosophies enhances its richness and importance in art history.

When Oppenheim created Le Festin, the 1959 happening in which she served a feast on the body of a beautiful girl, she claimed not to have had feminism in mind. But like Le Dejeuner en Fourrur, it is open to multiple interpretations, depending on whether one wishes to assume a feminist, a Freudian, or a Jungian point of view. While it can be seen as a reclamation of the nude female form from the codes that had determined it in the past, from Oppenheim’s standpoint, Le Festin was a celebration, a ritual, or a rite. In this sense, the event made archetypal and pagan connections between the feminine state of being and the abundant gifts that spring forth from a fertile earth. When Breton invited her to reenact the event at the
Exposition inteRnatioOnale du Surrealisme (EROS) show, once again, her work was misinterpreted as a misogynistic indulgence in the objectified, cannibalized female. Seen this way, the female form is again objectified for masculine pleasure, and turned into an inanimate object upon which food could be served. Here, the masculine hungers for food and sex are sated.

Oppenheim denied having any intention of the work being understood in this way, but this again sounds coy or, according to Raaberg, disingenuous. “Le Festin opens a gap between women as male objects of desire and the female subject who assembled it” (Raaberg, 5). As with Dejeuner en Fourrure, she claimed not to have conceived of Le Festin in masculine terms, but were her true intentions purely archetypal? Was this really an unconscious act in which she missed the misogynistic interpretations, or were her denials simply part of an act she played in a game of dual interpretation, set up to tease her audience?

In a 1972 speech she delivered in Basel, Oppenheim claimed there was no masculine or feminine art. She cautioned women to avoid producing work directed only at a female audience and urged men to find the feminine spirit in within themselves. Androgyny, she said, lifts creation to a higher level. Turning away from Freud, Meret Oppenheim looked to Jung as a way of overcoming the limitations placed on her as an artist and as an individual who was most famous for something she hardly considered her own creation. In maturity, her understanding of androgyny transcended that of the original male Surrealists. While I submit that she must have knowingly played to both sides despite her denials otherwise, it is my belief that Oppenheim’s work expressed a worldliness and wisdom that was sadly overlooked by conventional masculine readings of it. It is a shame that the other interpretations and a broader evaluation of her mature work has been sidelined, along with that of most other woman artists, in standard art historical and art critical texts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Belton, Robert J. "Androgyny: Interview with Meret Oppenheim." Surrealism and Women. Caws, Mary Ann, Keunzli, Rudolf, and Raaberg, Gwen, eds. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press. 1991.

Belton, Robert J. "Speaking with Forked Tongues 'Male' Discourse in 'Female Surrealism?" Surrealism and Women. Caws, Mary Ann, Keunzli, Rudolf, and Raaberg, Gwen, eds. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press. 1991.

Hubert, Renee Riese. "From Dejeuner en Fourrure to Caroline: Meret Oppenheim's Chronicle of Surrealism."Surrealism and Women. Caws, Mary Ann, Keunzli, Rudolf, and Raaberg, Gwen, eds. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press. 1991.

Raaberg, Gwen. "The Problematics of Women and Surrealism." Surrealism and Women. Caws, Mary Ann, Keunzli, Rudolf, and Raaberg, Gwen, eds. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press. 1991.