Curator, Anne Umland: I've always wondered with this object, what it is about it that makes it so unforgettable? And I think it's just Meret Oppenheim's sense of humor.
My name is Anne Umland. I'm a Senior Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA.
Meret Oppenheim liked to tell a story about how her fur-covered teacup, saucer, and spoon came to be. She and her two friends—a photographer named Dora Maar and an artist named Pablo Picasso—were sitting at an outdoor café in Paris one day in 1935. Meret Oppenheim was only in her early twenties at this point, and to support herself, had been designing jewelry and accessories.
And that day at the cafe she was wearing one of her designs, a bracelet covered with fur. Picasso looked at her bracelet and said, “You can cover anything with fur these days, can't you?”
And Meret Oppenheim responded by saying, “Yes, even this cup and saucer.”
She always said that this was really a whim, it was a joke, it was the result of a coffee get-together. But it's such an encouragement to all of us to just to delight in humor and fun and jokes and play.