Meret Oppenheim

Sitting Figure with Folded Hands

1933

Barely eighteen years old, Meret Oppenheim left for Paris in 1932, where she moved in the circle of the Surrealists around André Breton. ‘Sitzende Figur mit verschränkten Fingern’ was made in early 1933 – her ‘first oil painting [...] painted with fingers on cardboard’, as the artist later recalled – shortly before she would lay the foundation of her myth with Man Ray’s photographic series ‘Érotique voilée’ and the legendary fur cup ‘Le Déjeuner en fourrure’. A black contour line encloses the abstracted figure: the upper body is compressed into a dark blue triangular form, crowned by an elliptical head devoid of any individual expression. Age, gender, identity remain ommited. This insistent refusal of any identifying feature can be read as an expression of Oppenheim’s conviction that creativity encompasses both masculine and feminine elements – an idea she had come to through her study of Carl Gustav Jung. That this work amounts to far more than a painterly experiment is attested by the fact that it remained in her possession until her death. It entered the collection in 1987 as part of a bequest to the Kunstmuseum Bern. Translation generated using AI Original contribution by Heike Eipeldauer in: Matthias Frehner, Valentina Locatelli (ed.), Kunstmuseum Bern. Meisterwerke, Hirmer Verlag: München, 2016, p. 292.

oil paint on paper on cardboard, Originalrahmen oil on wood, Passepartout [textile covered]

32,5 × 26 cm (Image)

Kunstmuseum Bern, Legat Meret Oppenheim