Méret Oppenheim: Fame and the Myth of Aging

I’ve never really felt that young. When I was around six or seven years old, I often wondered how it was that everyone in my class seemed so much younger than me. I was always an observer before a participant, someone who didn’t talk until they decided they wanted to yap out an entire paragraph. But I want to be like them—I yearned as if my yearning was a rubberband. How is that born? A sense inside of my small body that youngness is elusive to me, despite, of course, now at 27 knowing how untrue that all is.

I’m someone who’s only ever felt young in the midst of experiences I knew would end soon.

My girlfriend’s mentioned a few times within the last couple of months about the fear of getting old. Or, while we’re reading or looking at our phones, she’ll suddenly turn to me and say, “Do you think we’re old?” The topic comes up usually on a night when we choose to stay inside rather than go out. For her, “being old” seems connected to the kind of activities we do when we have free time, endless amounts of energy, and when who we are is untethered to the pressures of daily life.

On the other hand, I’m someone who’s only ever felt young in the midst of experiences I knew would end soon. Someone who deeply relates to Kacey Musgraves when she sings, I’m the kind of person / who starts getting kinda nervous / when I’m having the time of my life. The awareness of bliss in me usually summons an about-face. As euphoria starts to fade, I’m already in mourning for a death before its occurrence. The moments before the crash, I’m young. Or is it actually that youngness is the sensation of experiencing what I know will end soon, the hingepoint, the self-awareness, that current pleasure will soon become a past?  

Méret Oppenheim and Her Rise to Fame

There’s an old saying that goes, “artists stop aging the year they become famous.” If it were true (which it isn’t), Méret Oppenheim was forever 22. At the age of eighteen years old, she left Basel, Switzerland and moved to Paris to become an artist. While occasionally attending her classes to study painting, she met Jean Arp and Alberto Giacometti who saw her drawings and invited her to participate in a Surrealist exhibition of avant-garde art. She soon joined the meetings at the Café de la Place Blanche where surrealist artists would meet, following an invitation from André Breton. She was younger than most of them, but funnier according to historical accounts—more mischievous than the rest.

When she was 22, she wore a bracelet she’d made herself, lined in fur, to meet her friends Dora Maar and Pablo Picasso at a café. As her tea cooled, she playfully asked the waiter if they could bring a muff over for the cup too, to stop it from losing heat. Drunk on the hilarity of her own joke, she decided to take it one step further—making a piece of art she called “Object.” She bought a cup, a saucer, and a spoon; covering each of the items in fur. 

“What amused me,” Oppenheim later recalled, “was the contrast between porcelain and fur, like the metal/fur in the bracelet.” Breton decided to exhibit “Object” under a different title—”Breakfast in Fur.” Under this name, this sculpture catapulted Oppenheim into instant fame when it became the first piece of art by a woman bought by MoMA for its permanent collection, where it’s still often on public display. 

People at the time found “Object” provocative, intriguing, and playful. Oppenheim, however, felt haunted by it as the years progressed. No matter how much she evolved her artistic practice and created an extensive body of work, she felt boxed in. The art scene had decided to make her, without her consent, a one-hit wonder in the mainstream press. In other words—suddenly, early success had made her old. 

What had started as a bit of fun increasingly took on the tone of an elaborate joke being made at her own expense. 

About Being Young

I’m past 26 now, the age in Victorian England considered the threshold into becoming an “old maid.” The debate over when women’s bodies as vessels for life-giving ends (which life being referred to, whether an unborn child or their own, is often left unsaid) and the expiration date of their beauty, is seemingly unending. Ten years ago, 40 was considered the moment when actresses were no longer bankable as a lead and now Demi Moore, for her performance in “The Substance” (a film I admittedly haven’t seen yet) about the desires of an actress to become young again, plays a 50-year-old woman mourning her youth. Moore, it should be said, played this role at the age of 63. “She looks so young!” headlines intoned throughout her awards season campaign, as if we couldn’t all in real time see her becoming an impossible standard of beauty herself. In other words, even during well-intentioned attempts to reconstitute what it means to get older, we can descend into reperpetuating harmful stereotypes anyway. 

This obsession with looking young, cute, and gorgeous—many people have endlessly discussed its origin points in the patriarchy. Though I don’t think patriarchy is entirely to blame here. Some of it, at least to me, seems connected to the desire to appear closer in reach to what I’ve been thinking of as youngness. 

As I mentioned before, the awareness of bliss usually catapults me into complete self-doubt. As the high is crashing, I’m in mourning before the conclusion of its descent. That moment of grief makes me feel as if I’m suddenly, indisputably, old. I become breathless at my own awareness of the inevitability of time. 

Trying to look younger might be a form of warping. A confession of the wish to continue seeking out openness, spontaneity, and experimentation—characteristics often associated with youth. It’s unsurprising that people would want to rekindle their proximity to its sensation, even just on an aesthetic level—particularly after feeling its inaccessibility. 

But what does it mean to reach a state of finality before life stops? 

How many women writers from that time that we all know and adore (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Ann Radcliffe, to name a few) were able to make work not in spite of but because of their position as “irrelevant” in the eyes of the patriarchy?

Women in Victorian England over 26 weren’t actually dead—they just existed on the margins of society. How many women writers from that time that we all know and adore (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Ann Radcliffe, to name a few) were able to make work not in spite of but because of their position as “irrelevant” in the eyes of the patriarchy? Most of them. Artists often make their best work as outsiders. 

But to be an outsider, of course, requires a certain degree of privacy and solitude. 

Oppenheim’s Evolution as an Artist

When “Object” was purchased by MoMA in 1936, Oppenheim became the center of the vibrant Surrealist art scene in Paris. That same year, she made the interdisciplinary painting “Red Head, Blue Body” a study in ink and gouache, lipstick and string. It depicts an off-kilter red circle in a blue background above a navy shape, all connected by a sequence of lines. But within the next year, Oppenheim was pushed out of France by the Nazi regime. She fled to Switzerland, initiating around a two decades-long depression where she made almost no art.

In 1954, she set up a studio in Bern, Switzerland and began working furiously, producing numerous sculptures that incorporated found objects. She also made countless paintings, drawings, and collages of the Swiss landscape that were influenced by her taste for abstraction—all, initially, created outside of the public eye.

In 1967, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm organized her first major career retrospective. For the first time, her work was represented in its totality, her identity as a multidisciplinary artist evident. It provided exposure and acclaim for the scope of her career and the breadth of her talent, while framing her achievements as exceptional for a woman. 

In 1975, she accepted the City of Basel Art Prize. In her speech for the award, she disputed the compartmentalization of her work as one made by a “woman.” She stated that any serious artist should be thought of as more than just their gender, that all possessed, as she put it, an “androgyny of the spirit.” 

“If you speak a new language of your own, that others have yet to learn,” she also warned from personal experience, “you may have to wait a very long time for a positive echo.”

A Digression 

I’m not sure where it was. It could’ve been Tokyo, it could’ve been Los Angeles. I was standing on the corner of a paved cement street, leaning against the kind of post connecting electrical wires to each other. I was around 11 years old, so in fact it most likely happened in Washington DC, when I was living around there before the stock market crashed in 2009. 

I remember it was early on a fall afternoon. For some reason, my father was talking to another man whose face I have no memory of. Strange, how my mind will soon freeze a statement from this conversation into me forever, carving it as if it were on the surface of my skull—yet something as essential as the destination of the following statement rests forever frozen, hidden behind gray smoke. This person who lives in the timeline of my artistic becoming asks I imagine a natural follow-up to a sentence uttered, but to my memory appears clear, distinct, without hesitation: 

“What do you wish for your daughter?”

A question usually phrased as: what would you like your daughter to become when she grows up? A question I frequently resented as the eldest child in my family—so often the recipient of comments about childhood milestones my parents learned how to field through mishaps, misrepresentations, and fumblings; all of which built a map of mangled expectations over my small body that at the time felt large. 

My parents, to their credit, were very good at finding nonanswers to that leading question. To my utter frustration, they would outright refuse to tell me what they thought I should do. This has led me as an adult to seek guidance for major life decisions from art, books, intuition, the colors of the cars outside of my apartment window, horoscopes, etc—anything but other human beings. 

This unknown man’s vague question about my future seemed to me at that time and also now, to hold the capacity to not just be a query about my future profession, but also refer to my future state of happiness, sense of self, and desire for possibilities beyond some prescribed notion of what it means to live a successful life. I remember being slightly taken aback by the care inherent in the phrasing of this question, which now that I think about it, might have been the moment of my conscious awareness of the power of words. What this man might have meant was just, what job do you want your daughter to have? But based on the framing of his curiosity, I was able to receive the question as one that gave me the space to wonder what in fact I did want from my life. The question of futurity resonated because while I might not have known it then, I now know that I care much more about the stuff of life—the pleasures and desires, the rigor of my curiosity, my ambition to make good use of the time I’ve got—than any professional aspirations. 

My mind, for less than a second, started to ask itself questions of my own, activated by this newfound sense of excitement for my future. But before I could get very far, my father responded without any hesitation. As if his answer was forever prepared in advance for the sake of this specific moment, he said, “I don’t want her to ever become famous.” 

While the question a moment earlier changed my relationship to my future as one now linked more to my sense of personal satisfaction than any profession, it shifted cosmically yet again in the following second. 

Not just was satisfaction enough, but also privacy. 

When I was 11, the importance of privacy seemed trivial, pointless, worthless to comprehend as a luxury. No one I knew was even remotely famous. While my grandmother had danced in Martha Graham’s modern dance company and my grandfather directed episodes of children’s television, they never became household names and to me seemed to be suffering less from lack of fame than various financial struggles that plagued them until their passing. In any event, fame to me seemed preposterous, absurd—an ephemeral force that had never crossed my mind as something to seek out or avoid. 

Fame might turn my passions and self into glass: transparent, breakable, and naked to the world.

Yet at that moment, once my father expressed his complete conviction in the horrors of fame and his wish for me to avoid it, I started to wonder why I shouldn’t desire it. Is it something other people want? I started to ask myself, by this point not listening to the rest of the conversation between the adults. I’m pretty sure the faceless man laughed in response, but after that, I have no idea what the rest of it entailed. Am I the kind of person who my dad thinks would want fame? I wondered, for the first time considering that he might think of me in ways completely outside of my field of vision. I was a theater kid who occasionally received compliments from friends’ parents about my “talent” who in her free time liked to read, so I guess my father could’ve wondered if maybe I would want to use my interest in writing and performance to become famous. Even as I thought about all of this, the possibility of it happening seemed so absurd that I hardly entertained what it might feel like. Even when I eventually studied performance and criticism in university at NYU Tisch, I could still never quite believe that I’d been given permission to make work and that people, who collaborators whispered to me as “important,” would like any of it. Yet the fact that my father that day so assuredly declared his distaste for fame, marked me. 

From that moment on, I became someone who was slightly fearful of myself, of what I was passionate about—of my own desires. Art, the ultimate form of self-liberation, now also possessed this possible danger called fame, a space that could surveil my unruly body. Fame might turn my passions and self into glass: transparent, breakable, and naked to the world. It would predicate my existence on the expectations of others, rather than for the life I suddenly, in a nanosecond, decided I might want to build on my own terms.

Ambivalence and Joy

“It’s too late for a different life,” Rachel Kushner writes to Durga Chew-Bose in an essay I read a year or so ago about joy and ambivalence. What we desire when we were young stays with us until the end, apparently—the taste for funny hats, girls, curved staircases, the ocean, chandeliers, black chunky boots, theaters, record players, roller skates, paintings of ships, books that smell like books, oversized t-shirts, red lipstick, the sunset, a good chair. Is that always so true? I occasionally challenge myself, listening to electronic music because, maybe this time I’ll like it. 

Unlike Chew-Bose, the barrier between me and unlocking joy isn’t necessarily ambivalence for it as much as my aversion to its public expression. No doubt tied to the self-policing I mastered during elementary school in Tokyo, while I’m a seeker of its abundance in solitude, I struggle to express its pleasure without feeling self-conscious. Even in front of those I’ve loved for years, who know me well, I hesitate. I’m an introvert with an extroverted demeanor, sure. I’m also not particularly good at appearing as if I don’t care, I wear enthusiasm too easily. While it’s in my nature to want to squeeze life, to feel myself a conscious participant in and of it—revealing that takes vulnerability, confidence, and trust in myself. It also requires me to not surveil myself all the time—but old habits die slowly. 

An even more impossible task, I imagine, for anyone in the public eye. Particularly painful for artists who make work out of the desire to challenge themselves, evolve, fail, and start again. 

Something Other than Old

“There is one thing I do not want you to ask me,” Oppenheim announced to an interviewer in 1978. She was in New York City in spring and her latest work was on display. Twenty blocks south of that uptown gallery lives “Object,” a work about which she refused to answer any questions. “I have been asked so often,” she said, “‘How did you have the idea of the fur cup?’ It bores me.”

Why do certain works of art resonate with the public? is a question no artist, publicist, curator, or company can ever predict, no matter what they claim. Analytics, which might be helpful in sports, are not useful in art. Pieces which have become global sensations—Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” Andy Warhol’s “Crack Is Wack” mural, Michelangelo’s “David,” Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” to name a few—to me, their common traits are relatively evident. All of them were (alas) made by men, all contain reinterpretations of some myth or societal stereotype, all were made by artists who received support from patrons or friends during their lifetime, and all contain some element of surprise. While each of those four pieces I referenced might seem dated and boring to all of us, when they each appeared, that wasn’t necessarily the case. For example, the “Mona Lisa” is a painting of a noblewoman of wealth in simple clothing, in the countryside rather than some ostentatious palatial home. When King Francis I of France purchased the painting in 1519, he found it provocative, intriguing, and playful—the same way I described how the Parisian public responded to “Object” when it first debuted in 1936.

The curse of “Object” might have been that its success rested on its element of pleasure—the pleasure of surprise. But the curators, public, journalists, and all of the people who asked Oppenheim if she would ever make a follow-up piece, who hounded her about her brilliance in making it—what they seemingly failed to understand is that it worked because of what it contains: humor, spontaneity, and the sense that it’s somehow alive. That isn’t replicable in material form. “Object” wouldn’t work if it was part of a sequence of cups, each lined with a different texture named after synonyms for “thing.” Or maybe it would, who knows. But Oppenheim was an artist not just because she made that piece, but because she also made other kinds of works that in and of themselves also contain elements of provocation, intrigue, and play. It’s just that, too often, all of us believe that these characteristics associated with youth, with youngness, are connected purely to age—that we somehow grow out of them.

The rest of Oppenheim’s artistic career attests to the falsity of this narrative. 

I wrote earlier about youngness as something we feel. But maybe it isn’t the right way to characterize what I mean. Instead, this fear of getting old that so many of us feel might actually be a sham. A scam which convinced us at some point that surprise has an expiration date. But invention, experimentation, and playfulness arrive when we renege on the myth that we’re fixed. When we stop believing that somehow we become famous at 18 and adults all at once, and can never change who we are from that point on. 

We don’t, and we can.

Featured image: Méret Oppenheim wearing a paper jacket she created, 1976.