The Great Beyond

John Haber
in New York City

Meret Oppenheim: Beyond the Teacup

Morris Hirshfield, Folk Art, and Surrealism

It did not take a fur-lined teacup to make Meret Oppenheim a star. She had already exhibited in Paris, little more than a year after her arrival at age 18, in 1932. It did, though, guarantee her a place in any history of Surrealism—and in the first Surrealist exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. It delivered on every promise of the movement as her finest peers never could.

If any modern movement is associated with liberating dark feelings, surely it is Surrealism. Many to this day have felt threatened by its anxious objects. And Object, or Le Déjeuner en Fourrure, became Oppenheim's most famous, no, her only famous work—and not solely for its playfulness. It suggests that one must taste something bristly and inaccessible. Is that fear related to a male viewer's unconscious associations with a vagina? As art historians focus today on the dark side of Surrealism, are they more stereotypically male than they may think? Oppenheim herself took to Carl Jung's sense of male and female in everyone, but a woman's art begs for rediscovery.

Surrealism stood to an alternative reality what Cubism had been to a difficult to decipher alternative space. It could boast of everyday sights and sensation, but in a nightmare world. It could boast, too, of the male gaze and female consciousness within. At least it could in theory, but not even a cage of seeming sugar cubes or a lobster claw atop a telephone could match Oppenheim's fur-lined teacup and its accompanying fur-lined spoon of 1936. And then, barely a year later, she found herself back in Switzerland, cut off from her allies and from seemingly everything she knew. That teacup became for all one knew her only work of art, but is that finally about to change? Over twenty-five years ago, a retrospective at the Guggenheim went "Beyond the Teacup"—and now MoMA displays two hundred works as "My Exhibition," the exhibition of her dreams.

As a postscript, women were not the only outsiders in Surrealism. It could even embrace, with a bit of irony, outsider art itself. As Oppenheim returned to Switzerland, much of the movement headed for New York. And shows there included a retired tailor who may still look oddly surreal. Ever wonder what happened to Grandpa Moses? If so, the American Folk Art Museum has a contender in Morris Hirshfield.

The seventeen-year crisis

Meret Oppenheim could stand for much of Modernism. Drawn early to Paris, she took part in its ferment. With works titled in both French and her native German, she suggests its cosmopolitan ideal. Most of her work dates from long after Surrealism at that. They include somber abstractions in oil, not unlike much American art of the 1930s. Indeed, painters such as Arthur G. Dove had a similar concern to retain the beauty of Surrealism without its sometimes rambling stories and its crises. Can it be that John Russell's textbook history of modern art does not mention her even once?

The teacup itself precipitated what she called her crisis period—that and her departure for Bern. Paris was becoming dangerous for the daughter of a German Jew, and whatever remained of Surrealism largely left for New York, but what did that leave for her? She was at once back home, with family, and in exile. She could take comfort only in her country's forests, lakes, and mountains. As a woman in Surrealism, like Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington, she may have felt alone from the start, and her crisis was gendered along with her art. She paints a mythical queen, wrong accused, naked and in exile—and Daphne, pursued by Apollo, morphing into a tree.

Early work stakes out her place between nightmare and whimsy. She could be illustrating a dark children's book, like Wanda Gág, did her drawings not include suicides by hanging. Object occupies that same place, as does a squirrel with a beer glass for its body and actual fur for its tail. Midcareer work becomes a survey of Surrealism all by itself. Oppenheim said that her work foresaw Surrealism even before Paris, and Surrealism itself merely gave her an audience. Yet her full-length sculpture, like that of Barbara Chase-Riboud, would be inconceivable without Spoon Woman by Alberto Giacometti, her found objects without Joan Miró, her polished bronze without Man Ray, her painted circles without Jan Arp, her mad love without Pierre Molinier, her mind games without Marcel Duchamp, her wilder fantasies without Max Ernst, and the near-empty landscape of her first paintings back home without Salvador Dalí.

It is a fine survey of Surrealism all the same—and an eye-opener when it comes to Oppenheim. My favorite works most remind me of the teacup (photographed here by Man Ray), whose alternative title plays on Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, or Luncheon on the Grass, by Edouard Manet. Another meal, seemingly art stained with blood, again juxtaposes a culture's obsessive associations with food, violence, and sex. Works like this rely on small objects, isolated from their everyday context by their museum solitude and subtle juxtapositions. Unable to live easily alongside their familiar associations, their modesty and challenge look strikingly forward to the 1960s. I was reminded of Yoko Ono decades later.

MoMA borrows its exhibition title from another kind of survey—twelve drawings of work in her studio. If she had trouble advancing, she could hardly help looking back. Still, her crisis ended in 1954 with growing recognition, especially in Berlin, and she had a new stage ahead before her death in 1985. As in much postwar art, colors brighten and fields of color outgrow their more finicky past. Diamonds, their edged curving in, float over a dark civilization on the horizon, as New Stars. A Swiss fog settles in, bringing other paintings close to monochrome and allowing them to shimmer.

Does her output look more diverse than anyone dreamed? The flip side of diversity can be a lack of character and bite—a criticism all too often leveled at women artists in male circles, such as Lee Krasner. An opening photograph at the Guggenheim in 1996 presented Oppenheim herself with an elegance worth admiring. I could not help thinking, though, of its resemblance to Marcel Duchamp in drag as Rose Selavy, but without his self-reflective irony. Still, she is taking the long view, even while indulging in the moment. She calls one work her CV Since 60,000 B.C.E.

I reached her show at the Guggenheim all those years ago in a state of exhaustion, after more than five hundred works of African art. Like Africa, a woman's dreams stood to Surrealism as a dark continent. These many years later, the Modern lightens up, thanks to Anne Umland, Natalie Dupêcher of the Menil Collection, and Nina Zimmer of the Kunstmuseum Bern as curators. Yet both shows prove the independence of what men had hoped to appropriate. Both also confirm Surrealism's steady insight into the fears of its audience and the power of the suppressed. If a broader view of Oppenheim cannot escape the past, modern art has not yet exhausted its reach for the present.

Grandpa Moses

No, Morris Hirshfield never married Grandma Moses or lived to a ripe old age. Born some years after her, in 1872, he died well before her in his sixties. Nor did he come to stand for America's heartland and its folk traditions. A Jew from Eastern Europe, he emigrated at age eighteen, settling in New York City. He could not have carried on as so public a figure anyway. Illness had obliged him to retire from the clothing business in his fifties. In fact, it enabled him to take up painting. If New York put him at the center of the action despite his limits, he reveled in it.

He played the part of the folk artist as well. You will recognize the style instantly, from his awkward female models, naked and clothed, to the decorative patterns behind them. He had all the familiar hard edges and flat, off-kilter anatomy. He brought an obsessive stippling to the grass and swirls to the sky, but nothing less than the figure would do, front and center. For Ammi Phillips, it brought a painting closer to a sampler. For Hirshfield, it brings art closer, too, to his subjects as a clothier—and their descendants lingered on Orchard Street for a long time to come, until Lower East Side art and real estate drove them out.

He played the outsider well, too, and insider artists ate it up. He had the touch of madness that drew an earlier Modernism to Henri Rousseau, for The Sleeping Gypsy and The Dream. He had his wild animals and birds, too, if not Rousseau's enchanted forest or creatures escaped from captivity for Walton Ford. It helped that enchantment had grown into Surrealism. André Breton included him in the first survey of Surrealism in America, alongside such artists as Leonora Carrington, and the Folk Art Museum hangs a few as well. Sydney Janis, the influential dealer, had already embraced him—and no less than Peggy Guggenheim, at Art of This Century, hosted his memorial show in 1946.

Yet he saw himself as a traditionalist. In his only self-portrait, he stands with his palette in one hand and three brushes in the other, while his model stands before him and a canvas on the wall behind. True, he painted not from life but from memories, of his clients and mannequins. But then his first bursts of creativity came with women's shoes, in frightful colors, and the curator, Richard Meyer, includes them as well. As a painter, Hirshfield's subjects start with the nude but play out as a theme and variations. It comports with outsider art in all its repetition and restless, anxious imagination.

He had just a few years before his death. From the nudes, it is just a step to clothed women looking ever so chic with their dogs. The women morph into showgirls and the pets into cats and dogs parading with their young—and a mustachioed tiger on the prowl. Was it only natural for a Jew to move from there to Daniel in the lion's den, comfortable and kingly? He also paints the ultimate power couple, Moses and Aaron. Hey, grandpa.

Yet he paints a Christmas tree, too, and the museum sees a need to assimilate. I shall leave the mind of the artist or of God to Moses. Who can say, too, how much his touch of madness was intentional? I suspect a serious sense of humor, while later decades barely saw art. A young woman in a portrait, perhaps a sales clerk, has terribly tiny feet. Call it coincidence, or call it self-justification for his devotion to shoes, but I cannot help seeing a smile.

jhaber@haberarts.com

"Meret Oppenheim: Beyond the Teacup" ran at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through October 9, 1996. "My Exhibition" ran at The Museum of Modern Art through March 4, 2023, Morris Hirshfield at the American Folk Art Museum through January 9.