TELEVISION : Meret Oppenheim ou le surréalisme au féminin

SUR ARTE
jeudi 03 octobre à 0h10 (56 min)

Origine : ZDF

Pays : Allemagne

Année : 2013

 

 

Elle a connu Breton, Giacometti, Duchamp, Max Ernst et s'est faite photographier nue par Man Ray, mais Meret Oppenheim s'est toujours refusée au rôle de muse. Portrait sensible et sensuel d'une artiste inclassable, plasticienne, écrivaine, poète et féministe ardente, qui aurait eu 100 ans le 6 octobre 2013.

 

Née en 1913 à Berlin d’un père allemand et d’une mère suisse, Meret Oppenheim étudie la peinture un peu en dilettante et arrive à Paris en 1932, où elle rencontre Breton, Giacometti, Duchamp et Max Ernst, et se fait photographier nue par Man Ray. Plasticienne, écrivaine et poète, mais aussi féministe ardente, elle se refuse au rôle de muse. En 1936, elle devient célèbre avec son Déjeuner en fourrure, photo d’une tasse, avec soucoupe et petite cuillère, recouvertes de peau de gazelle, qui devient un emblème du surréalisme. Mais celle qui est aussi un écrivain prolifique ne créera pratiquement plus durant dix-huit ans, faute d’inspiration, dit-elle. Même si, en 1950, elle réalise les décors et les masques de la pièce de Picasso Le désir attrapé par la queue. Elle meurt en 1985. Ce portrait fait largement appel à ses textes – poèmes, carnets et d’étonnantes transcriptions de ses rêves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

BERLIN / Martin-Gropius-Bau : Rétrospective Meret Oppenheim

Meret Oppenheim. Retrospective

Martin-Gropius-Bau

Niederkirchnerstraße 7
10963 Berlin

18/08 1/12 2013

 

MERET OPPENHEIM- Porträt mit Tätowierung, 1980

Berlin is dedicating a first major retrospective to Meret Oppenheim to mark the centenary of the famous artist's birth here on 6 October 2013. The playful and humorous treatment of everyday materials, conveyed with constantly new connotations, is a special feature of Oppenheim’s artistic works and links her to her artist friends whose company included Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Hans Arp and Man Ray. The photographs in the “Érotique voile” series (1934), in which Man Ray posed his model, are now among the most outstanding works of surrealism in the Parisian circles of which Oppenheim was highly acknowledged. The discursive power of her surrealism could be felt in 1983 when her Oppenheim Fountain was inaugurated in Bern’s Waisenhausplatz, a visit to which is highly recommended.

read more

The reception of Meret Oppenheim’s extremely diverse oeuvre, influenced by experimentation and upheavals, metamorphoses and the “dream-like”, has not always been easy. The artist dispensed with uniformity or recognisability in favour of experimental joyfulness which enabled her to transcend the confines of an artistic style, a genre or a linear development.
Language, myths, games and dreams served her purpose as impetus just as literary sources and the psychoanalysis of C.G. Jung. “Freedom isn’t given to you – you have to take it”, Oppenheim summed up her position in 1975.
Her emancipatory, non-conformist attitude and her critical approach to social stereotyping and allotted gender roles made her a central identification figure for following generations of women artists.
The exhibition will show the whole spectrum of Meret Oppenheim’s oeuvre, which in its independence and diversity is still a pioneering force even today. Following Oppenheim's artistic method, who kept returning to specific motifs over long periods of time and subjected them to new treatment, the show runs a course through the ever-densifying themes in a cross-section of the artist's creative periods: magic objects, dream scenes and myths, depictions of the invisible, cadavre-exquis and play as an artistic method, the search for identity, metamorphoses between the sexes, between human being and animal, nature and civilization. Starting out from her much appraised early work in the circle of the surrealists and proceeding to her less well-known poetic late work, the exhibition will show not only drawings, paintings, objects and collages, but also her writings and dream notations as well as her humorous and fantastical jewellery, dress and other designs. “Every idea is born with a form. You never know where the ideas come from: they bring their form with them; just as Athena sprang out of the head of Zeus, helmeted and armoured, thus do the ideas emerge with their apparel.”
In 1982, Meret Oppenheim was honoured with the Art Prize of the City of Berlin. In the same year, she participated in documenta 7. Shortly before her death, she became a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts. She died in Basel in 1985.
The retrospective is being produced in close cooperation with the artist’s family and with the Kunstmuseum Bern, home of the Meret Oppenheim Archive, which owns in the artist's legacy the most important collection of Meret Oppenheim's works.
The exhibition was produced together with Kunstforum Vienna


Meret Oppenheim, née le 6 octobre 1913 à Berlin-Charlottenburg et morte le 15 novembre 1985 à Bâle, est une écrivaine, une artiste peintre et plasticienne surréaliste suisse.