Meret Oppenheim

An Evening in the Year 1910

1972

A golden-yellow sky, streaks of orange-red clouds, and beneath them a midnight-blue house by the lake, flanked by dark trees. The colours seem inverted like a negative, an afterimage on the retina. And the picture surface imitates tiles, without any discernible reason for this. The title, too, poses riddles. Why does one remember a particular evening sixty-two years before the picture was made and why does that evening remain so uneventful? Meret Oppenheim leaves the loose ends untied. The contradictions persist, and the painting withstands them. Most convincing is the thought that Oppenheim followed an inner vision – as she often did – and deliberately accepted a simplified, almost naïve manner of painting in order to do so. The art historian Christiane Meyer-Thoss describes such works as carriers of ideas, arising from a spiritual intimacy with their creator and rooted in universal memory. They recall images that do not exist at all – Meyer-Thoss is thinking here of a painting by Edvard Munch that never existed. ‘Ein Abend im Jahre 1910’ lives in this in-between realm: it is echo, resonance, memory and an idiosyncratic outlier in Meret Oppenheim’s work. Translation generated using AI Original contribution by Kathleen Bühler in: Kunstmuseum Bern (ed.), Merets Funken. Die Sammlung Gegenwartskunst 2, Kerber Verlag: Bielefeld, 2013, p. 200.

oil and enamel paint [alkyd resin] on hardboard [Pavatex for imitation tile], restored by the artist, original frame, enamel paint on wood [spruce]

50,2 × 65 cm (Image)

Kunstmuseum Bern, Legat Meret Oppenheim