The fur cup, fame, and the trap of it

The little cup moved fast. It debuted in Paris in May 1936 at Breton’s Exposition surréaliste d’objets at the Charles Ratton gallery, then traveled that year to the London International Surrealist Exhibition, where Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, saw it. Barr brought it into MoMA’s landmark winter exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (1936–37), and there something telling happened: visitors to the show voted Object the “quintessential Surrealist object.” Of everything in a large survey, the public picked the furred teacup as the one that most was what Surrealism meant.

On the way into MoMA’s own collection, one nuance is worth keeping rather than flattening. MoMA’s credit line reads “Purchase,” with the acquisition dated 1946, and several sources say Barr bought it himself while conservative trustees balked. By those accounts it entered the museum’s study collection in 1946 and was formally accessioned into the permanent collection in 1963; the public credit line still says Purchase.

That 1946 date is the root of a claim you will see everywhere: that Object was the first work by a woman to enter MoMA’s collection, the distinction that earned Oppenheim the nickname “the First Lady of MoMA.” It is worth stating carefully. The claim hangs on the 1946 study-collection date; the work was not accessioned into the permanent collection until 1963, and the sources run from the confident (“MoMA’s first work by a female artist”) to the hedged (she was thought to be the first woman in the collection). Take it as a widely-repeated distinction with a real asterisk, not a settled record.

The fame was instant and it was a cage. Oppenheim was twenty-two when she made Objectin the spring of 1936 (she turned twenty-three that October), and the cup made her a celebrity of Surrealism almost overnight. But a single, perfect, unforgettable work can eclipse a whole life, and this one did: for decades she was “the fur-teacup woman,” the maker of one famous thing, while a long and varied career, poetry, painting, objects, sculpture, jewelry, ran on for another half-century behind it. She came to resent the reduction, both the reduction to the one object and the reduction to a “woman Surrealist,” a muse and a mascot rather than an artist with a full body of work.

That resentment hardened into one of the things she is best remembered for saying. Accepting the Art Award of the City of Basel (the Basler Kunstpreis) on 16 January 1975, she spoke about what it took to be a woman and an artist, and ended on this:

“Freedom is not given to you, you have to take it.”

Meret Oppenheim, from her 1975 Basel Kunstpreis acceptance speech. The line is genuinely hers, but it circulates in two near-identical translations of the same sentence, also rendered “Freedom is not given; one has to take it.” That is one saying in two English dresses, not two sayings.

It is a fitting line to leave the fur cup on. The object that made her famous nearly swallowed everything else she did, and the woman who made it spent her life insisting she was more than its maker, that no one was going to hand her a place in art and she would have to take it. The teacup is still in New York, still small, still impossible to drink from, and visitors still flinch at the rim. The flinch is the proof that it works.