Books of Ideas

Meret Oppenheim’s early drawings and fashion designs, many of them published here for the first time, provide a welcome opportunity to explore the thoroughly improvised, experimental, and marginal approach of this extraordinary artist. Oppenheim created what might be called a «book of ideas». The spontaneity of her creative impulses weighed more heavily than quality as a criterion in selecting the drawings for publication. The artist had studios in Berne, Paris, and Carona (Ticino); it was the atmosphere of her immediate environment that dictated her working rhythm. Photographs of the family’s home in Carona, the interior of which still bears Meret Oppenheim’s signature, close the ring formed by her life, her work, and her passage through the world. This publication testifies to the open-minded attitude of an artist with enough confidence to «apply» her art, an attitude ironically demonstrated in 1936, when she created the «fur cup» that established her reputation but also labeled her a Surrealist for decades. «Applied art»: for Meret Oppenheim that always meant the candid application of art to the realities of life.