Discombobulating Dreams

Like a scene from a discombobulating dream, a glass of cold, foam-topped beer beckons one’s thirst, but as the hand reaches out to bring this elixir to parched lips it encounters a soft furry tail instead of a glass handle, making imbibing this draught an impossible task. A task as improbable as catching a restive squirrel by its tail.

This is Meret Oppenheim’s Eichhörnchen / Écureuil / Squirrel, 1960/1969, which has entered the NGV Collection through the M. G. Chapman Bequest. A classic Oppenheim sculpture that combines prosaic and surreal elements to startle and delight the viewer, this work also has a violent undertone when one considers that the object’s non-handle is a severed squirrel’s tail. There is also a sensual element to the work; for, while frustrating attempts to drink beer from it, its furry handle affords the handler an erotically soft frottage.

Meret Oppenheim was born in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1913, and her childhood was spent between Switzerland with her grandparents (her grandmother had studied art in Düsseldorf and was a popular children’s book illustrator) and Steinen, in southern Germany, where her father ran a medical practice. Erich Oppenheim regularly attended Carl Jung’s psychological seminars in Zurich; and, not surprisingly, his daughter began recording her dreams from the age of fourteen.

The young Meret attended the Rudolf Steiner School in Basel, where she became familiar with the unsettling works of Alfred Kubin, George Grosz and the German Expressionists. As a teenager she began creating disturbing and violent images with morbid titles like One person watching another dying that indicated her development as a unique and provocative personality.

Recognising Oppenheim’s precocious intellect and independent spirit, her father funded her move to Paris in 1932, at the age of eighteen. Here she quickly got to know artists who were interacting with the nascent Surrealist movement, such as Alberto Giacometti, Kurt Seligmann, Sophie Taeuber, Hans Arp and Max Ernst, with whom she became romantically involved for a year before ending the relationship, living up to her motto: ‘You have to take freedom. No one will give it to you’.¹Bice Curiger, Meret Oppenheim. Defiance in the Face of Freedom, trans. Catherine Schelbert, Parkett Publishers, Zurich-Frankfurt-New York, 1989, p. 2. She began to make abstracted works that hovered between painting and sculpture, influenced by the work of Arp, such as Head of a drowned man, 3rd state, 1933, an ovoid wooden shape painted blue and decorated with dragées (sugared almonds).

In 1933 Giacometti and Arp invited Oppenheim to exhibit with the Surrealist circle in the Salon des surindépendants, a non-aligned organisation that welcomed all artistic creeds. Here she met the founder of Surrealism, André Breton, who asked her to join him and fellow Surrealists at their regular social haunt, the Café de la Place Blanche, near the Moulin Rouge in Montmartre. She attended the gatherings here every day between six and eight in the evening; though she later recalled, ‘I didn’t say much at the time, and I was right not to, because I didn’t understand French very well. What’s more, given my age, I didn’t yet have any clear ideas, especially about politics, which was their favourite topic of conversation then’. ²Meret Oppenheim, interview with Suzanne Pagé and Béatrice Parent, in Meret Oppenheim, ARC Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris, 1984, p. 13.

She collaborated with the American photographer Man Ray, famously posing for him nude at a printing press, smeared with ink. When this image, titled Érotique voilée (Veiled Eroticism) accompanied Breton’s essay ‘La beauté sera convulsive’ (Beauty will be convulsive) in the journal Minotaure in 1934, it catapulted the beautiful young Oppenheim into the stratosphere of Surrealism’s certified muses.

In 1936, due to his Jewish heritage, Meret’s father was forced to close his medical practice and relocate to Basel. As he was no longer able to finance her stay in Paris (being German, he was not allowed to practice medicine in Switzerland), she now turned to designing clothing and jewellery to supplement her income. Through Man Ray, she had secured a commission to create jewellery items for the celebrated couturier Elsa Schiaparelli. One was a bracelet that featured light-weight brass tubing with its exterior lined with beaver fur. Oppenheim was wearing it while having coffee with Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar at the Café de Flore in Saint- Germain-des-Prés when, she recalled, ‘They joked that anything could be covered with fur. “Like this cup and saucer”, I replied’. ³ibid., p. 16. In her words:

Soon after this, I ran into Breton in Saint-Germain and he told me about an upcoming exhibition of objects and asked me to make something. I remembered the idea of the cup and saucer covered in fur. I bought a cup, saucer, and spoon at Monoprix [department store]. I had some very thin ratty fur at home; it was Chinese gazelle. What amused me was the contrast between porcelain and fur, like the metal and fur in the bracelet. That was the idea. ⁴ibid.

Entitled simply Objet (Object), this new work, a fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon, was featured in the Surrealist Exhibition of Objects held at the Charles Ratton Gallery in May 1936. Photographed by Man Ray and illustrated in the May 1936 issue of the journal Cahiers d’art that carried Breton’s article ‘Crise de l’objet’ (The crisis of the object), Oppenheim’s furry table setting, totally useless for either eating or drinking from, exemplified Breton’s argument that Surrealist sculpture should not have any rational function or purpose. As Edward D. Powers has noted, Oppenheim’s objects ‘are not so much useless as against usefulness altogether’. ⁵Edward D. Powers, ‘Meret Oppenheim – or, These Boots Ain’t Made For Walking’, Art History, vol. 24, no. 3, June 2001, p. 364.

Objet became a star attraction in the Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the winter of 1936–37. MoMA director Alfred H. Barr Jr. subsequently observed that few works of art had in recent years captured the popular imagination as much as Oppenheim’s sculpture, around which ‘the tension and excitement caused by this object in the minds of tens of thousands of Americans have been expressed in rage, laughter, disgust or delight’. ⁶Alfred H. Barr Jr., ‘Surrealism: what it is in Literature and the arts. Its origin and future’, World Today, April 1937; quoted in Natalie Dupêcher, ‘“FINALLY! FREEDOM!” The Work of Meret Oppenheim 1932–1954’, in Meret Oppenheim. My Exhibition, MoMA, New York, 2021, p. 18.

Suddenly famous in artistic circles on both sides of the Atlantic at the young age of 22, Oppenheim returned to live with her family in Switzerland in 1937, where she entered into years of personal and artistic crisis, what Josef Helfenstein has described as ‘like mummification’, whereby ‘the downside of this early fame and its associated hype … was that Oppenheim became the victim of her own work, which stuck to her like an all-distorting label’, as ‘the early fame of [Objet] had a punishing, rather than positive effect on Oppenheim’s whole career’. ⁷Josef Helfenstein, ‘Against the intolerability of fame. Meret Oppenheim and Surrealism’, in Jacqueline Burckhardt and Bice Curiger, Meret Oppenheim. Beyond the Teacup, New York, 1996, p. 29.

Though she made extraordinary paintings in this period, it was not until the mid- 1950s that Oppenheim, then living in Bern, was able to engage seriously again with the art world and re-establish a studio for her art practice.

It was in 1960 that she was to turn again to fur to create another useless but disarmingly enigmatic object/sculpture. This was the original version of her Eichhörnchen / Écureuil / Squirrel, which was produced initially as a one-off piece. In 1969 Oppenheim collaborated with Galleria La Medusa Grafica in Rome to produce a numbered edition of 100 authorised copies
of this sculpture. The NGV’s Squirrel is number 20/100 from this edition.

Dr Ted Gott is NGV Senior Curator, International Art.

The NGV warmly thanks the M. G. Chapman Bequest for supporting this acquisition for the NGV Collection.

This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 58 May–June 2026.

Notes