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AP®︎/College Art History
Course: AP®︎/College Art History > Unit 6
Lesson 2: Modern and contemporary art- Courbet, The Stonebreakers
- Early Photography: Niépce, Talbot and Muybridge
- Manet, Olympia
- Painting modern life: Monet's Gare Saint-Lazare
- Monet, The Gare Saint-Lazare
- Velasco, The Valley of Mexico
- Rodin, The Burghers of Calais
- Velasco, The Valley of Mexico
- Van Gogh, The Starry Night
- Van Gogh, The Starry Night
- Cassatt, The Coiffure
- Munch, The Scream
- Gauguin, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
- Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott Building
- Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
- Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
- Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
- The first modern photograph? Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage
- Stieglitz, The Steerage
- Gustav Klimt, The Kiss
- Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss
- Analytic Cubism
- Matisse, Goldfish
- Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912
- Kirchner, Self-Portrait As a Soldier
- Käthe Kollwitz, In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht
- Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye
- Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow
- Stepanova, The Results of the First Five-Year Plan
- Meret Oppenheim, Object (Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon)
- Meret Oppenheim, Object (Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon)
- Frank Lloyd Wright, Fallingwater
- Kahlo, The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas)
- Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series (*short version*)
- Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series (*long version*)
- Duchamp, Fountain
- Lam, The Jungle
- Mexican Muralism: Los Tres Grandes David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco
- Rivera, Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park
- de Kooning, Woman I
- Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building
- Warhol, Marilyn Diptych
- Yayoi Kusama, Narcissus Garden
- Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay
- Oldenburg, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks
- Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty
- Venturi, House in New Castle County, Delaware
- Basquiat, Horn Players
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Meret Oppenheim, Object (Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon)
Meret Oppenheim, Object, 1936, fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon (The Museum of Modern Art) © Meret Oppenheim
A conversation with Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris. Created by Smarthistory.
A conversation with Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris. Created by Smarthistory.
Video transcript
(pleasant piano music) - [Steven] The artist Meret Oppenheim was sitting in a cafe in Paris in 1936 with Picasso and Dora Maar. - [Beth] They were admiring a bracelet that Oppenheim was wearing that she herself had made,
which was metal wrapped in fur, and Picasso remarked, "You
could cover anything with fur" - [Steven] And Oppenheim said,
"Even this cup and saucer." And soon after, she purchased
some Chinese gazelle and wrapped a cup and saucer and spoon, which is what we're seeing here. This object became very
famous very quickly, and cuts to the heart of
the surrealist strategy of the collision of things
that don't belong together in order to rupture our sense of normalcy - [Beth] Oppenheim was a
serious surrealist artist. She was engaged with
the surrealists in Paris at a very young age. And felt very strongly about the independence of
the freedom of the artist, and how difficult those
things were as a woman artist. And so, although that famous
story about this object is a fun one to tell, it
does center it around Picasso and could lead us to forget about the importance of
Meret Oppenheim herself. - [Steven] And the artist was keenly aware that she was too often viewed
as muse and as a companion. But Oppenheim was forceful in her assertion of her
own artistic independence. - [Beth] I do wonder whether Picasso or a male member of the surrealist group would've adopted domestic
objects like this and have done something
so creative and unusual. - [Steven] The teacup and saucer and spoon was associated with the domestic, with the feminine, as is fur. But there is this striking
and aggressive relationship between the cool, crisp, smooth, hard quality of the porcelain, and the tactile quality of the fur. - [Beth] You describe the
fur as being feminine, and we could associate the fur
with a fur coat, for example. But the fur also for me represents the wild and the uncivilized, these things that are so elemental, as opposed to the polite society
in which we usually think of the teacup and saucer and teaspoon. And so there's a kind of brutality and even violence here, to me - [Steven] The idea of wet, warm, fur touching your tongue, touching your lips, liquid pouring across that into your mouth is immediately repellent. But it's interesting to think
about why it's repellent. To think about it through
a psychoanalytic lens. And psychoanalysis was of deep interest to the surrealist community. That while our conscious mind, our civilized mind, our public
mind, is repelled by this. At a deeper level, our unconscious
mind is attracted to it. That there's a degree of desire
that we have to keep hidden. And the conflict between the
unconscious and the conscious is what makes us so deeply uncomfortable. And that is a conflict that has been so much a
part of modern culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. And I think the brilliance of the object is its
ability to bring to the fore this collision between polite society and the rawness of the interior self. (pleasant piano music)