A fur bracelet, a café, and a dare

Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985; pronounced “MEH-ret OPP-en-hime”) was a German-born Swiss artist who had come to Paris in 1932, at eighteen, and fallen straight into the circle around the Surrealists. Surrealism, founded in Paris in 1924 by the poet André Breton (1896–1966), was the movement built on the idea that the unconscious mind, the part that runs your dreams without asking, should be let up onto the canvas and the page, short-circuiting the tidy rational mind that normally keeps it quiet. Oppenheim modeled for the photographer Man Ray, showed in the group’s exhibitions, and was, at twenty-two (she turned twenty-three that autumn), one of its youngest and most striking members. That inner circle was overwhelmingly male, and the women in it were more often muses and models than recognized authors. She was also broke, supporting herself partly by designing things to sell.

One of those things was jewelry. She had designed a bracelet: a metal tube wrapped in fur, an animal warmth banded around the wrist. The couturière Elsa Schiaparelli (the daring Italian-French fashion designer who loved exactly this kind of strangeness) bought the design to sell in her shop. So in 1936 Oppenheim was walking around Paris with fur on her arm, and that small fact is where the most famous object in Surrealism is supposed to have begun.

The story goes like this, a well-repeated account rather than a documented transcript. Oppenheim was sitting at a Paris café (the retellings name the Café de Flore) with Pablo Picasso and his partner, the photographer Dora Maar. The two of them admired the fur bracelet, and Picasso joked that you could cover just about anything in fur. Oppenheim shot back, gesturing at the table, “Even this cup and saucer?”, and, as the tale continues, when her tea had gone cold she asked the waiter for “un peu plus de fourrure,” a little more fur.

Take the scene with a light hand. It is repeated by reputable sources and is broadly consistent, but it is a reported exchange with small variations from telling to telling: which café, the exact words, whether the “more fur” line really happened that afternoon. What is solid is the riposte to Picasso, kept attributed to her, and the result. Shortly after, Oppenheim went and did the thing the joke had named. She bought a cup, a saucer, and a spoon, and she covered them in fur.