Meret Oppenheim – or, These Boots Ain’t Made For Walking

Meret Oppenheim’s point‐blank rejection of the sexy sobriquet André Breton conjures up for her fur teacup –Breakfast in Fur– and again, for her pair of boots – by her simply called Das Paar, but by him Undressing– a war of words more importantly veiling a battle of the sexes. At stake is not only Oppenheim’s spectacularly ambivalent relationship to the Freudian theorizing which informs Breton’s titles, and in turn, Surrealism far more generally. For even disavowing Freud in word, yet she avows the quintessential stuff of his fetish in deed, or more accurately, in fur and feet. But also at stake is a kind of literalism – an immediate, self‐referential quality to the bodily material support of her objects – which both sets them apart from the endlessly metaphorical play of man‐made Surrealist objects of these years, and even anticipates contemporary Feminisms.