An extract from Swimming with Tigers by Kathy Hopewell

Before I imagined what Meret Oppenheim’s Object (fur-covered cup and saucer) from 1936 might say if it could talk in my first-ever post on this Substack, I had already written a fictitious account of the creation of it in my novel, Swimming with Tigers.

In the novel, Oppenheim’s Object is made by my character Penelope who has run away from her upper-class family in Britain and come to Paris to join the surrealists in a similar manner to the way Leonora Carrington defied her father and went to Paris to live with Max Ernst. You can perhaps already begin to see how I have thoroughly mixed up the people and artworks of surrealism in the 1930s to create my own fictional world.

Here is the scene in which Penelope makes the famous Object. It felt deliciously wicked to ‘steal’ this moment from history and play with it! You’ll note that the scene is set in 1938, two years later than the real Object was created by Oppenheim, and at the end of my novel I have an Author’s Note that details all the liberties I have taken with the facts.

If you’d like to read more about how I fictionalised the women surrealists in Swimming with Tigers then head on over to my website where there are also some reader reviews.

You can buy Swimming with Tigers on Amazon, Blackwells and Barnes and Noble or order it from your local bookshop.

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy this extract!

Chapter Seven

Paris, January 1938

For Penelope, the building on Rue Jacob where she lived with Rolf was an enchanted place. It was a house out of a fairy tale in the middle of the city. The only one set back from the road, it had two pillars at the gate leading to a tiny courtyard where a tall conifer grew higher than the roof. Two-thirds up the tree was the window of the flat that she shared with him.

She turned the key and once inside climbed the steep, shallow steps, stubbing her toes in haste. Opening the door to the studio, she encountered some resistance because a pile of magazines had fallen off the printing press and slithered across the doorway. Rolf was at Alain’s and would not be back for hours. She replaced her fancy jacket with a dirty laboratory coat and set a kettle on the gas flame. From among the scraps and brushes and drawing pins and pencils she unearthed a white teacup, saucer and spoon and took them to the bathroom to wash.

The water was tepid and the soap had been finished long ago so Penelope rubbed at the coffee stains with her fingers under the meagre stream. There was a curly black hair in the sink. She remembered the large draughty bathrooms of her childhood. There, the taps were gold and thick white towels were replaced daily by servants. It was not often that she thought of England; perhaps it was meeting that strange woman called Suzanne two days ago and talking about her home that had brought the memories into her mind again.

Back in the studio, she put the cup down on the table. Next to the palette knives and bottles of linseed oil was a heap of grey-brown gazelle fur that Rolf had picked up in the market for a few sous. She stroked the soft pelt and smoothed the skin on the other side with a pitying finger, then she tried bending, bunching and folding it to see how the fur stood out at angles, and ran her fingernail through it to make a parting as if on a head of hair. Then she reached for the scissors and paused for a moment to gaze at Rolf’s photograph of her from the first few weeks after she had arrived in Paris. In the picture she lay naked on the floor, and the edges of her body were liquefied and oozing like molten flow. It brought back the way she had felt in those early days with Rolf when her skin was alive and soft with desire and her body seemed to be spilling over into his.

She began to carefully cut out a large circle from the pelt of the gazelle. That melting state was probably the reason why she never bothered about Rolf claiming the technique that produced this liquefied outline as his own discovery when in fact it was Penelope who had come upon it by chance. It happened one morning in the darkroom when, in a fright after something ran over her foot (it could have been a mouse), she had put on the light. Realising that it would ruin the picture in the developing tray, she hurriedly switched the light off again. Once Rolf had seen the results of this accident he immediately started to experiment with creating blurred edges around pictures of her face and hands and body.

She smoothed flat the circle of fur on the paint-splattered table and pictured it as a small dinner plate piled with steak and potatoes. On the floor there was a jar of flour and water paste and she looked around for something to stick the fur to. The kettle was whistling so she went to switch off the gas and picked up the saucer. She slathered the paste on the base of the saucer and pressed the fur onto it but the paste was too weak for the job. She wiped it off and went into the bedroom to find some glue.

On the unmade bed was D’Argent’s book about Natalia, a beautiful waif he had met years ago. Natalia had gone mad and had to be locked up. In Penelope’s opinion, Natalia was a whey-faced, whimsical fool who had let people walk all over her. Natalia’s big thing was living spontaneously; she was a free spirit and D’Argent had been obsessed with her character and attitude as a template for the surrealist way of life. But when she went insane, he had completely abandoned her and had never been able to bring himself to visit her. Apparently Natalia was still locked away and D’Argent refused to hear her name spoken.

Penelope found a pot of hide glue that Rolf had used to fix a chair and took it with her. Once the glue was hot, she settled back to her work. As she cut and glued and cut again, her mind emptied. She went to retrieve the cup as well, and continued. The water cooled in the kettle.

An hour later, Rolf burst in, carrying two baguettes and laughing at some joke of Alain’s. He threw down the bread as soon as he saw the fur-covered cup.

‘Penelope,’ he called out. ‘Did you do this?’

She came over to stand next to him and looked at her work. ‘Yes, do you like it? Shall I serve tea?’

‘It is astonishing. Alain. Jean. Come and look at this,’ Rolf said, switching to French for the benefit of his guests.

All four stood looking at the object on the table.

‘May I?’ asked Alain, in his suave voice, but Jean had already begun to stroke the cup. Then he seized the tufted spoon and ran it down the side of his cheek, grinning.

‘There is still time to add it to the cabinet,’ said Alain.

‘Of course, it must be so. It must go into the exhibition,’ said Rolf.

‘Yes,’ agreed Jean, replacing the spoon, ‘next to the gramophone that swallows legs.’

‘I will take it later but first we must eat. Have you eaten already, little one?’ asked Rolf.

‘No, not yet. You mean my cup is to be in the exhibition?’

‘It is a masterpiece, Rolf,’ said Alain, transfixed.

‘Well done,’ Rolf murmured into her ear. […]

©Kathy Hopewell

Object by Meret Oppenheim, 1936