Meret Oppenheim

Meret Oppenheim was born on 6 October 1913 in Berlin, Germany, to a German father and a Swiss mother, and grew up moving between Germany and Switzerland. She decided to become an artist around age sixteen and studied briefly at the Kunstgewerbeschule (Allgemeine Gewerbeschule) in Basel in 1929 and 1930. In 1932, at eighteen, she moved to Paris and attended the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere, though her attendance was described by contemporaries as occasional; she worked largely on her own and quickly entered the circle of Surrealist artists around Andre Breton, Max Ernst, and Man Ray, who photographed her in the series later known as Erotique voilee (1933).

In 1936 she created Object, a teacup, saucer, and spoon entirely covered in fur, which was shown that year in Andre Breton's Exposition surrealiste d'objets in Paris and in the Museum of Modern Art's Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition in New York; MoMA acquired the work soon after. The years that followed were difficult. Oppenheim later described a prolonged personal and creative crisis, and in 1937 she returned to Basel, where she enrolled in vocational training in art conservation and restoration to support herself, continuing this training for roughly two years.

She resumed a full, sustained studio practice in the 1950s and continued working across sculpture, painting, drawing, jewelry, and stage design through the following decades, living between Bern and Basel. Recognition grew steadily in her later years: she received the Art Award of the City of Basel for 1974, becoming the first woman to receive it, and in 1982 she received the Grand Art Award of Berlin and was elected a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin, the same year she showed at documenta 7 in Kassel. Meret Oppenheim died on 15 November 1985, in Basel, Switzerland.

Oppenheim's critical standing has shifted markedly since her death, moving from an early framing as a Surrealist muse and photographic subject, most famously through Man Ray's images of her, toward recognition as an independent artist with a body of work spanning six decades. The 2021 to 2023 touring retrospective Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition, organized by Kunstmuseum Bern with the Menil Collection and the Museum of Modern Art, brought together nearly two hundred works and was widely described as her first major United States survey in more than twenty-five years, reinforcing a critical consensus that her later painting, drawing, and design work deserves the same attention long given to Object. Since 2001, Switzerland's federal Grand Award for Art has itself been conferred as the Prix Meret Oppenheim, a posthumous honor that underscores her institutional standing in Swiss art history even though it is not an award she personally received.

Oppenheim's auction market is comparatively small relative to her museum stature, reflecting a body of work that is largely singular, sculptural, or object-based rather than serially produced. The highest price identified in available auction records is GBP 529,200 (roughly USD 677,000 at the time) for Tisch mit Vogelfussen (Table with Bird's Feet), 1939, sold at Christie's in 2024; the exact sale date, saleroom location, and its standing as a confirmed all-time record could not be fully verified in available sources. Price-guide platforms including Artprice, askART, LiveAuctioneers, and MutualArt track auction results for her work. Collectors should treat any single result with care given the limited number of comparable sales.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Meret Oppenheim. Kunstmuseum Bern holds the principal archive and has led the major recent scholarly exhibitions, and current market activity runs primarily through Hauser & Wirth and Karma International, alongside historic Surrealist-specialist dealers. Because her auction history is comparatively thin and dominated by a small number of high-value, one-of-a-kind objects rather than a deep run of comparable sales, collectors should weigh any individual price against her broader museum record rather than treat it as a stable market trend line.