This article is part of our Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on how museums, galleries and auction houses are embracing new artists, new concepts and new traditions.
When the artist Amy Sillman visited “Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition” last year at the Kunstmuseum Bern in Bern, Switzerland, she was not sure what to expect. “I went in knowing two pieces by her, the teacup and the gloves,” Ms. Sillman said.
She referred to “Object” (1936) — a fur-lined teacup, saucer and spoon that became one of the most famous single artworks in all of Surrealism — and a pair of suede gloves with veins stitched on the outside that Ms. Oppenheim (1913-85) completed just before her death.
“What else could be in there?” wondered Ms. Sillman, an abstract painter based in New York, about the show. “And then it blew my mind.”
The show, opening Oct. 30 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and running through March 4, has many surprises, not least of which is that it reflects at least some of the ideas that Ms. Oppenheim herself had for how a retrospective of her work should be presented.
Two years before her death, the Swiss artist made 12 detailed, identically sized “Imaginary Exhibition” drawings, showing how more than 200 of her works dating back to childhood should be shown, wall by wall and at relative scale.
The immediate reason for her plan was a forthcoming 1984 retrospective of her work at the Kunstmuseum Bern, but she had been thinking about her legacy for years, with an eye to correcting what she had called the “mixed-up” presentations that had come before.
At a time when artists, especially female artists, were arguably constrained in determining the shape of their careers and images, Ms. Oppenheim’s methodical self-determination was noteworthy in a way that may resonate with today’s viewers.
“I’ve always been interested in the ways artists shape their own legacies,” said Anne Umland, the senior curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA who was a co-organizer of the show.
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Neither that 1984 show nor this year’s follows Ms. Oppenheim’s instructions to the letter; around a third of the works that the artist laid out in her drawings are in the MoMA show, which, after its Bern iteration, also stopped at the Menil Collection in Houston this past spring and summer.
“We didn’t set out to locate every work depicted in the drawings,” Ms. Umland said. For one thing, “recreations aren’t interesting.”
But the artist’s own plans were hovering in the background nonetheless. “We honored her commitment to being essentially chronological, and to how she mixed tiny works on paper with big sculptures,” Ms. Umland said.
The more she and the other curators researched and read, the more the “Imaginary Exhibition” series became “an open-ended blueprint,” Ms. Umland said.
As they traveled around to look at works, “we thought, ‘Oh, that was in her drawings,’” she said. “And we found ourselves going back to them.” The 12 drawings themselves are in the current show, too.
MoMA was a natural venue for the exhibition, given that “Object” is in its collection. Acquired soon after its making, it gained notoriety after being shown in the landmark 1936–37 MoMA show “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.”
Not everyone was in on the joke. A writer from an Illinois newspaper decried it as a prime example of the “goofiness” of the cutting-edge art of the day and exasperatedly asked, “What next?”
Ms. Oppenheim was only 23 when she made the work, a witty distillation of the striking juxtapositions Surrealism became known for. The brainstorm came to her in a freewheeling Parisian cafe conversation with Pablo Picasso and the photographer Dora Maar.
“What has always struck me as mind-boggling is that she made the teacup when she was so young,” Ms. Umland said. “She’s virtually self-taught at that point. A talented prodigy.”
She added, “You can’t deny that it’s unforgettable. But she had a complicated relationship with it.”
Ms. Oppenheim was born in Germany but her family moved to Delemont, Switzerland, when she was young. She moved to Paris when she was 18 to study painting and fell in with the Surrealist crowd fairly quickly. A couple of years later she posed for the artist Man Ray, who photographed her in the nude, partially covered in ink and behind the wheel of a printing press.
Ms. Oppenheim’s niece Lisa Wenger said that as children, she and her cousins knew the artist as “the famous, glamorous and fun aunt.” Ms. Wenger, based in the Swiss town of Carona, now helps to run Ms. Oppenheim’s estate on behalf of the family and has published two books about her.
As an older woman, “when she would walk into a restaurant, every head would turn, even if they didn’t know her,” Ms. Wenger said of her aunt. “She was regal and dignified.”
Ms. Wenger learned as an adult that there was ballast behind the image Ms. Oppenheim created. “She could be very assertive,” Ms. Wenger said, adding, “Meret had a strong hold on her own biography.” Ms. Oppenheim wanted to keep certain details, in particular a romantic relationship with Marcel Duchamp, out of the public view.
The artist’s interest in controlling her own narrative was complicated by the renown of “Object.”
“It was a love-hate relationship,” Ms. Wenger said. She recalled that Ms. Oppenheim once told a relative, “If I wanted to be famous, I would just do fur objects.” But “she was also flirting with it,” Ms. Wenger said, referring to the work’s outsized reputation.
The artist was proud that “there was no typical Oppenheim work,” Ms. Wenger noted. “She once said, ‘I would sacrifice anything for freedom.’”
The current exhibition certainly proves the artist’s versatility and changeability. Just as in the theoretical show she planned in 1983, there are some very early works on hand, like the 1929 gouache “Daydream,” with a glowing flower emerging in the center of the composition.
“Oppenheim includes teenage drawings to show she had a Surrealist mind-set before she ever met the Surrealists,” Ms. Umland said.
Not long after the height of her Surrealist fame, Ms. Oppenheim suffered almost two decades of creative block, during which her output slowed, though it never fully stopped.
She eventually emerged to make works like “The Couple” (1956/1967), made of boots and coiled laces, also featured in “My Exhibition.” In her 60s, she was actively making new work, including the bronze sculpture “Six Clouds on a Bridge” (1975).
Ms. Sillman — who showed a keen interest in work of the past in her “Artist’s Choice” show at MoMA, “The Shape of Shape,” for which she mixed together objects from the museum’s collection — said she appreciated Ms. Oppenheim’s “playful” unpredictability and her unwillingness to be defined by others.
“That’s why it’s a challenge to art history,” Ms. Sillman said. “It was a shockingly free way of making art.”
