Three things from a department store, and a pelt

There is almost nothing to the making, and that is the radical part. Oppenheim did not carve or model or cast anything. She went to a Paris department store, bought a plain white cup with its saucer and a metal teaspoon (ordinary goods, the kind of place setting in a thousand kitchens), and bought a piece of the speckled tan fur of a Chinese gazelle. Then she wrapped the cup, the saucer, and the spoon in the fur. The whole work is a purchase and a covering. The hand that made it spent more effort choosing than fabricating.

That economy is deliberate and it is the engine of the thing. A traditional sculpture announces its labor: marble cut, bronze poured, hours of craft you can see. Object hides all of that, because there isn’t any. What it asks you to register instead is a decision, a displacement, one familiar thing put in contact with a wrong material. The fur is real fur and the cup is a real cup, and the only art is the joining.

Three different titles attach to this single object, and they are not interchangeable. Object is the plain title MoMA uses, often expanded, descriptively, to Object (Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon), the medium pressed into service as a name. The romantic French nickname everyone repeats is Le Déjeuner en fourrure, usually rendered “Luncheon in Fur” (loose English versions like Breakfast in Fur are one more step removed).

Here is the trap: that French title was not Oppenheim’s. Breton, the Surrealist leader, hung it on the cup as a literary pun, glancing at Manet’s famous picnic painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe and, more slyly, at the erotic novel Venus in Furs, an association Breton built into the name rather than one Oppenheim put in the cup. Her own working title was prosaic, roughly cup, saucer and spoon covered with fur. So when you see the witty French name credited to her, that is Breton’s wit, not hers. Use Object as the real title; treat the French as the nickname a colleague hung on it.