Meret Oppenheim ’s Ma Gouvernante, a pair of white leather pumps trussed up like a Sunday roast and served on a silver platter, is an allegory of other-womanhood. In 1933, three years before she exhibited Ma Gouvernante at her first solo show, Oppenheim began an affair with Max Ernst. She was 20, studying art in Paris; he was 44. His wife, the painter Marie-Berthe Aurenche, was 29. The shoes were Aurenche’s, a second-hand gift from Ernst to Oppenheim, who bound and plated them. After the exhibition ended, she sent the piece to the couple’s house, where Aurenche disassembled the sculpture and gave away the shoes.
Oppenheim seems to have enjoyed playing up to the image of the Surrealist femme sauvage. She posed nude for Man Ray behind the wheel of a printing press, one palm covered with ink, her hair slicked back and her neck encircled by a thin black band. The machine’s handle suggestively juts out from her pelvis while she holds the wheel, as if she’s stroking one penis while sporting another. Her parents had named her after the feral child Meretlein in Gottfried Keller’s novel Der grüne Heinrich (1855). Meretlein is taken in by a Christian family, who try – and fail – to beat her into submission. She dances naked, charms snakes and possibly even worships the devil. Oppenheim’s mother, Eva, was the daughter of the Swiss suffragette and children’s author Lisa Wenger; her aunt Ruth was briefly married to Hermann Hesse. Her father, Erich, was a German-Jewish doctor who was friendly with Carl Jung: he encouraged Oppenheim to record her dreams from an early age. Eva annotated her drawings – ‘Cinderella on a ladder/A tree on the right flowers to the left’ – and Oppenheim pasted some of them into Mein Album, a visual autobiography completed in 1958 and now published in English for the first time.
Mein Album was in part a therapeutic exercise. In 1937 Oppenheim left Paris for Switzerland: her father had been forced to abandon his Berlin practice and could no longer support her. In Basel she enrolled in vocational school to study painting and art conservation. Although she continued to work, she fell into a depression that stifled her output for the next eighteen years. ‘I felt,’ she later wrote, ‘as if millennia of discrimination against women were resting on my shoulders, as if embodied in my feelings of inferiority.’
Send Letters To:
The Editor
London Review of Books,
28 Little Russell Street
London, WC1A 2HN
letters@lrb.co.uk
Please include name, address, and a telephone number.