Méret Oppenheim

Méret Oppenheim
Negative of X-Ray of Meret Oppenheim’s Skull, 1964
Born	Méret Elisabeth Oppenheim (1913-10-06)6 October 1913 Berlin, German Empire
Died	15 November 1985(1985-11-15) (aged 72) Basel, Switzerland
Education	Académie de la Grande Chaumière, Basel School of Arts and Crafts
Known for	Painting, Sculpture, Poetry
Notable work	Object: Breakfast in Fur (1936) My Nurse (1936) Giacometti's Ear (1933)
Movement	Surrealism
Awards	Art Award of the City of Basel

Méret Elisabeth Oppenheim (6 October 1913 – 15 November 1985) was a German-born Swiss Surrealist artist and photographer. Oppenheim was a member of the Surrealist movement of the 1920s along with André Breton, Luis Buñuel, Max Ernst, and other writers and visual artists. Besides creating art objects, Oppenheim also famously appeared as a model for photographs by Man Ray, most notably a series of nude shots of her interacting with a printing press.

Méret Oppenheim was born on 6 October 1913 in Berlin. Oppenheim is named after Meretlein, a wild child who lives in the woods, from the novel Green Henry by Gottfried Keller. Oppenheim had two siblings, a sister named Kristin (born 1915) and a brother named Burkhard (born 1919). Her father, a German-Jewish doctor, was conscripted into the army at the outbreak of war in 1914. Consequently, Oppenheim and her mother, who was Swiss, moved to live with Oppenheim's maternal grandparents in Delémont, Switzerland. In Switzerland, Oppenheim was exposed to art and artists from a young age. Oppenheim was inspired by her aunt, Ruth Wenger, especially by Wenger's devotion to art and her modern lifestyle.

Oppenheim discovered the writings of Carl Jung, a friend of her father's, and was inspired to record her dreams in 1928. Her dreams would serve as important sources for much of her art throughout her life. The work of Paul Klee, the focus of a retrospective at the Kunshalle Basel in 1929, provided another strong influence on Oppenheim, arousing her to the possibilities of abstraction.

In 1932, at the age of 18, Oppenheim moved to Paris and sporadically attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1933, she met Hans Arp and Alberto Giacometti. After visiting her studio and seeing her work, Arp and Giacometti invited her to participate in the Surrealist exhibition in the “Salon des Surindépendants,” held in Paris between 27 October and 26 November. Oppenheim later met André Breton and began to participate in meetings at the Café de la Place Blanche with the Surrealist circle. The conceptual approach favored by Marchel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Francis Picabia became important to her work.