The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

MERET OPPENHEIM

Cast up by the receding sea
Comes to cool our tired faces
And our bodies hiding
In the tepid dark of our sleeping desires
Stand up straight.
Our nap the lice have plagued
Ends
And the brief lapping of the waves
On the beach where the azure dances
Has fallen quiet, my love,
And it’s raining.
—mary ann caws

Meret Oppenheim

(Elizabeth Oppenheim) 1913–1985

berlin, germany

A

photographer, poet, painter, and sculptor, Oppenheim is best known

for her sculpture The Fur-Lined Teacup (1936), which launched her

into immediate fame and became an icon of Surrealism. This work

was photographed by Man Ray. In 1937 Oppenheim left Paris to study in Basel, in

an attempt to catch up with her growing international reputation. She quickly

fell into a depression that lasted seventeen years. In the 1950s she began to work

again and in the 1960s was rediscovered as a mature artist who had retained loyal

ties to Dadaism and Surrealism. She died in Paris. Principal works: Ma gouver-

nante, my nurse, mein Kindermächen, 1936; Le Couple, 1956; Meret Oppenheim:

Defiance in the Face of Freedom (an anthology), 1989.

Dream in Barcelona

I am lying down with a man in a bed at the far end of a large room. All along
the walls there runs a Greek relief, as in the Parthenon. Through a little door at
the other end of the room there comes something, a sort of paranoid sculpture