The Fur Cup Speaks

Object by Meret Oppenheim, 1936

Welcome to The Fur Cup newsletter! Fittingly, this first imaginary encounter with Surrealist art is with Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered teacup itself, famous around the world as a Surrealist icon. 

Here we are, then, wandering around the gallery at MoMA in New York when, in a strange and inexplicable suspension of reality, we hear Object (Breakfast in Fur) begin to speak…

I’ve seen you recoil from me.  I’m older, and a little thinner than I was back in 1936 when the crowd that gathered around my cabinet at the New York exhibition told me all I needed to know about my extraordinary success.  And even now, a knowledgeable parent will point at me and say ‘that’s a famous one’.  Then they say ‘imagine having your tea out of that!’ to the child beside them, who winces.  Yes, even children shudder at the idea of lips meeting dry fur instead of hot comforting liquid.  Then along come the lecturers and tour guides and they drone on about Freudian fetishism, making it sound about as interesting as a Number 9 bus instead of the darkest well of human sex fixation. 

Inside I am cool china.  Even if I am from a department store (Monoprix in Paris, since you ask), I have an elegance of form that I share with the most elevated tableware.  I call up the curled finger, the circle of dainty cakes on a metal stand quietly wheeled into the parlour.  My inner shape is the epitome of feminine respectability, but outside I am of the tundra, the jungle, the wild.  I am fierce and I make you think of sharp claws and teeth even if my outer skin is from prey (gazelle), not predator.

When you look at me you see the joke and feel the fear all at once.  Yes, it’s funny—no one would require a teacup to be covered in fur.  Then you get the discomfort: this is fundamentally wrong.  This disturbs me.  Why?  You scarcely dare ask, do you, already suspecting embarrassment and awkward private disclosure?  Some do want to stroke and touch, I see that twitch in the arm which has to be suppressed (I am behind glass, of course), but with that muscular impulse comes the shudder, the skin-of-the-milk disgust as they imagine lifting me to their lips. 

I’ve been continuously exhibited since the 1930s and while the fashions change from hats to bare heads, from jackets to open collar shirts, then shirts to T-shirts, still that look on their faces remains the same: amusement, disgust, perplexity.  The note that usually accompanies me references Manet’s picture of a picnic, Dejeuner sur L’Herbe, where the men are dressed and the women are naked and also mentions Venus in Furs, that pornographic book by Sacher-Masoch.  But the note doesn’t say that it was André Breton, Surrealism’s commander-in-chief, who gave me the name Breakfast in Fur; Meret Oppenheim, who made me, called me simply Object. 

My maker suffered after creating me and never felt warm towards me.  She made me as a joke then got stuck with being known only for me.  Yes, she did a couple of other fur-covered things: the gloves with wooden fingers, for instance, and you could count the much later squirrel-tailed beer glass as my sibling as well, but the years following my birth, years of war, were hard for her.  She told me about it one day when we were alone and she was brushing me clean.  I had made her famous but then she got sick, and stuck, and she’d resented me for years, she said, for boxing her in.  Well, I think I’m the expert there after nearly 90 years in a temperature-controlled glass vitrine, I wanted to reply but she is my mother and I do feel sorry for her.  No child wants to bring their parent pain. 

My fame, however, pleases me greatly.  I am ‘an icon of Surrealism’.  To think, I could have become a grubby bit of crockery, soon cracked and discarded and never had this long life if she hadn’t transformed me at the perfect moment when Surrealism was stretching towards new forms like the object, the film, and the fashion industry. 

I am a woman’s work, so am I female?  There’s the question.  If I represent the hollows of a woman’s body it was impossible to say so then: it was a much more repressed time.  Unless you were a Surrealist, of course.  There was no shortage of coarse talk around me when I was made about plunging the spoon into the cup or licking away the drips at the rim.  But I like to feel I have an innocence, a pure, playful spirit that calls up a smile rather than a leer.  I am fun, and a little bit sexy, and that’s worth a lot when there are all these solemn pictures with unsavoury ideas about sex as violence or warfare or mutilation.  But that’s Picasso for you.  And this takes me back to my conception because Picasso has been identified as my progenitor. 

He, Dora Maar and Oppenheim were in a café together and some accounts say that he was the one to suggest it was possible to cover anything in fur after noticing my mother wore a fur-covered bracelet that she had made for Schiaparelli.  He would muscle in on the story, wouldn’t he?  His supporters push him forward as my father and imply that Meret simply put his idea into practice.  But other versions give Dora Maar the credit for remarking on the bracelet, which prompted Meret to ask the waiter for a little more ‘fur’ in her coffee cup and sparked her idea to cover the cup in fur, like her bracelet. 

The truth is that in a moment of pure creative joy she took an object that symbolised the domestic confinement of women and the repressed behaviour expected of them at tea tables through the centuries and told a new story.  I embody her boldness, her wit and her courage to disobey everything we knew about art. 

I am a woman’s laugh, echoing down the years.