The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Meret Oppenheim · an assemblage: a teacup, its saucer and a spoon, each covered in pale, short fur · made in Paris in 1936 · titled Object by the artist; known also as Le Déjeuner en fourrure, a name reported to be André Breton’s · the Museum of Modern Art, New York · the unit scored is the one assemblage of 1936, three parts as one work with its title; the photographs of it and the artist’s other works are context
Mode
The Surrealist object: three manufactured things chosen and altered by one covering, so that their use is abolished and their look kept
Mythos
The vessel as the receiving body, made literally a body; the meal laid over the killed animal; the feast with a woman and the fur as fetish evoked by the second title
Phase
Made in Paris in 1936, at the height of the Surrealist call for the object with a symbolic and erotic function
Presentation
A cup, saucer and spoon of plain design, each covered in pale, short fur with the nap laid to keep the line; the spoon across the saucer; a set of domestic size
Register
A shudder: an involuntary recoil of the mouth, met at once, with the soft pleasure of the fur under it
Scale
Three small things, one material, one title, at one table
Governing Proposition
A plain teacup, its saucer and a spoon, of an ordinary design, are covered in pale, short fur, laid smoothly so that each keeps the line of what it was. The cup can still be seen as a cup and can no longer be drunk from; the spoon still has its bowl and handle and can no longer be put in the mouth. The wager of the object is that one material laid over three bought things can make the body recoil before a thought is formed, and that this recoil, which no description of the idea produces, is itself the content: the polite table and the animal’s skin are one surface apart.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Meret Oppenheim made Object in Paris in 1936. It is a teacup, its saucer and a spoon, each covered in fur. The museum that holds it, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, lists it under the artist’s own title, Object; it is known as widely by a second, Le Déjeuner en fourrure, Breakfast in Fur, which is reported, not certain, to have been given it by André Breton. The unit scored is the one assemblage of 1936, its three parts as one work, with its title as it is shown. The photographs of the object, by which most people know it, and the artist’s other works are context and are not scored.
The three things are of an ordinary design, the kind of service laid out for a guest in the afternoon. Nothing in their shape is remarkable, and that is the point of the choice: nothing in the form distracts from what has been done to it. Each is covered in a pale, short fur, its nap laid smoothly, so that the cup keeps its round and its handle, the saucer its well and rim, and the spoon its bowl and its handle. The spoon lies across the saucer. There is no modelling of form by hand. The making is choice and covering: three objects, one material laid over them, one title.
The test of subtraction is short, because there are so few parts, and every one is required. Without the spoon the work loses the one thing made to go into the mouth: the cup is met at the lip, but the spoon is the instrument that crosses it. Without the saucer the set ceases to be a service and becomes one odd cup. Without the fur nothing is left but crockery, and a long or dark fur would make the effect comic or bestial rather than intimate. What yields is the particular cup, since any of its pattern would serve, as with Fountain, and the longer title, which if it is another hand’s is not compelled by the object. The requirement is real, and it is the economy of a single idea.
Movement II
Described in words, a cup covered in fur is a joke. Made, it is a sensation of the mouth that the body cannot refuse. The mind sees a cup and the lips prepare for glaze; the eye reports hair. The recoil comes before any thought about it, in front of the object or in front of a photograph of it, and it does not depend on knowing who made it or when. That gap, between the idea in a line and the thing in the hand, is what the object exists to open, and it is the work’s strongest claim. It does through touch imagined by sight what only an object can do.
The form is the instrument, and each of its choices is exact. The fur must be on a cup and a spoon, not a plate or a knife, because those are the things that meet the lips. It must be laid smoothly, so that the vessel stays legible as a vessel, since only a cup that is still plainly a cup makes the transgression felt. It must be pale and short, so that it reads as skin rather than costume. The spoon, which crosses the lip and meets the tongue, is the sharpest of the three: furred, it makes tasting itself unthinkable. The work is held below the top of its axis because the knowledge, once felt, is one thing, and the photograph carries much of it without loss.
The elevation is of the dreadful and intimate kind: the sense of drinking from a body. Few objects of this size produce a response so physical from an image alone. It is not beauty in the usual sense, though the fur is soft and pale and the set has a quiet proportion. But there is one effect, met at once and in one register, and looking longer deepens curiosity more than it carries the viewer higher. Its height is a shiver, sharp and repeatable at every encounter, and it is one shiver.
Movement III
Take the two most distant elements, the hard glazed vessel, made for washing and for the mouth, and the soft hide, made for the animal and for warmth. One law governs them: the surface of the body is laid where the body must not be. The cup, which the lip touches; the spoon, which the tongue meets; the saucer, which the fingers hold: each is furred to the same degree, smoothly, without exception and without ornament, so that no part breaks the law or merely decorates it. But the law governs three small objects and one material, and narrowness is not coherence: the range between its farthest elements, sharp as it is, is small.
What the object discloses can be said. The civilised and the animal are one surface apart: the cup, the emblem of manners and of the polite afternoon, is made of the same thing as a pelt, and the mouth that touches the one would touch the other. The polite meal is laid over the killed creature. The eroticism latent in domestic ritual comes to the surface, and the reading most often returned to, that the vessel offered at a woman’s table is a body, is carried by the thing without a word. Yet its strongest effect is a shudder, which is a mood, and the meaning, the uncanny of the domestic, was the declared programme of the movement it came from. The work makes it felt more than it uncovers it.
The archetype is built in one place. The cup is the vessel, the oldest image of the receiving body, and furred it is made a body in fact, so that the pattern is in the material and not in allusion. Food and the hunted animal are joined in one surface. The rest is summoned rather than built. The second title, joining Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe to Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, brings the feast with a woman and the fur as fetish; it is credited as evocation, and it is not the object’s. The wider myth, of the woman as consumed object and of the feminine reclaimed, is largely what readers since the 1970s have brought to it.
Movement IV
Behind the object stand the readymade, from Duchamp, and the Surrealist object as Breton and Dalí called for it at the start of the 1930s: the found or assembled thing with a symbolic and erotic function. Oppenheim does not choose and leave alone, as the readymade does. She alters the chosen thing in one stroke, so that its use is abolished and its look kept, and she addresses the sense that art had hardly addressed, touch, and touch at the mouth. Beside the busy, anecdotal objects of the movement it is economical to the point of severity. The stake was a young artist offering the sharpest object of a movement led by older men; but the path had been asked for by the movement itself, and the object was embraced at once. A real turn, at modest cost.
The making is a set of exact decisions with a real hand in them, more than the readymade has: the plain service chosen so that nothing distracts, the pale short fur with its nap laid to keep the vessel’s line, the spoon clothed without losing its shape, the set laid with the spoon across the saucer. These decisions carry the work. But the medium commanded is narrow: the forms are bought, the covering is a craft of gluing and fitting, and the maker’s hand shows only in the fit. The two titles divide the work’s meanings in the same way. Object names the thing and its programme; Le Déjeuner en fourrure adds Manet and masochism, and with them a reading that the object carries but does not compel.
This is what holds the work in Tier III. Its form, its law and its survival stand high, and it is the purest object of its movement; but its axes of consequence stand below the summit’s bar, and its elevation below the minimum. Its disclosure is felt more than uncovered, its built archetype one move, its swerve a turn the movement had asked for, its reach wide as an emblem and diffuse as descent, and its height a single shiver. Against Fountain (8.0), the nearest in kind, it loses on the axes of consequence by wide margins and wins on the axes of the made thing, and stands a tenth below. The Treachery of Images (8.1), the other emblem of an object and its name, stands above it on the swerve and on reach; it stands above The Son of Man (7.6).
Movement V
The object is ninety years old and stands in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, reproduced in nearly every account of Surrealism and of modern sculpture. Its three parts stand together, legible as a service; no loss of a part is on record, though the history of its conservation is thinly known. Its fabric is its risk. Fur is perishable and sensitive to light, and it cannot be renewed without the object becoming another object: the most fragile fabric of any work of its class. The span and the presence would allow a higher figure; the fragility of the fur holds it at the foot of its row. Of the five axes of the Epochal Gate it is the one that clears the bar.
Its reach is wide and hard to trace. Its place in the museum made it a textbook example of the movement, and general accounts often trace to it the domestic uncanny in later sculpture, the furred and soft objects of later decades and feminist art’s return to the domestic object; no single later work is documented as starting from it. The literature has renewed itself: the emblem of the Surrealist object, a fetish under psychoanalysis, a woman’s object about the female body at table under feminist criticism from the 1970s, a case in studies of touch. The questions stay open, whether it is erotic or a refusal of the erotic, comic or disturbing, Oppenheim’s or the group’s whose title it carries. But a return to the thing yields the same shudder again.
The orders it holds are few and held in one gesture: the body, at the mouth and the skin; nature, as the animal and its hide; the domestic and its manners, a class’s ritual of civility; and gender, a woman’s table and a woman’s object. One material touches them all. There is no person in it, no history, no labour but by implication, no state, no sacred order and no world beyond the table, and the figure describes the form. Beside The Persistence of Memory (8.6) and The Broken Column (8.1), the movement’s paintings at the desk, it has the smaller means. It is a cup that cannot be drunk from, with its spoon across the saucer.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is short because the parts are few, and each is required. Take away the spoon and the work loses the one thing made to go into the mouth: the cup is met at the lip, but the spoon crosses it, and furred it makes tasting unthinkable. Take away the saucer and the set ceases to be a service laid out for a guest and becomes one odd cup. Take away the fur and nothing is left but crockery; change it for something long or dark and the effect turns comic or bestial rather than intimate. What yields: any cup of the pattern would serve, as with Fountain, and the longer title, reported to be another hand’s, is not compelled by the object. The requirement is the economy of a single idea.
Score: 8.1 / 10
What it brings into the open can be stated, but only partly as meaning. The civilised and the animal are one surface apart: the cup, emblem of manners and the polite afternoon, is made of the same thing as a pelt, and the mouth that touches the one would touch the other. It discloses the eroticism latent in domestic ritual, and the reading most return to, that the vessel offered at a woman’s table is a body, is carried by the object without a word. The disclosure through touch imagined is credited in full. What holds it below 8 is that its strongest effect is a shudder, which is a mood; the meaning, the uncanny of the domestic, was the stated programme of the Surrealist object, and the work makes it felt more than it uncovers it.
Score: 7.8 / 10
There is an elevation, of the dreadful and intimate kind: the involuntary recoil of the mouth before a furred lip and spoon, the sense of drinking from a body. Few objects of its size produce a response this physical from an image alone, and the response does not wait on the history; it is immediate in every photograph. It is not beauty in the usual sense, though the fur is soft and pale and the set has a quiet, pleasing proportion. What holds the axis down is range and frequency. There is one effect, the frisson, met at once and in one register, and looking longer deepens curiosity more than transport. Its height is a shiver, sharp and repeatable, and it is the lowest axis of the twelve but one.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Some of the archetypes are built into the object rather than brought to it. The cup is the vessel, the oldest image of the receiving body; furred, it is made a body in fact, so that the pattern is physical and not allusion. The meal and the pelt are joined in one material: food and the hunted animal, the civilised table over the killed creature. The feast with a woman, Manet’s Déjeuner, and the fur as fetish, Sacher-Masoch’s, are summoned by the second title, not by the object, and are credited only as evocation. The particulars stay particular, a common cup, saucer and spoon. Held below 8 because the built structure is one move, the vessel made flesh, and the wider myth of the woman as consumed object is largely what readers since the 1970s have brought.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The inheritance is the readymade, from Duchamp, and the Surrealist object as Breton and Dalí called for it at the start of the 1930s: the found or assembled thing with a symbolic and erotic function. The departure is real. Oppenheim does not choose and leave alone, as the readymade does; she alters the chosen thing in one stroke, so that its use is abolished and its look kept, and she addresses the sense art had hardly addressed, touch, and touch at the mouth. Against the busy, anecdotal objects of the movement it is economical to the point of severity. The stake was a young artist offering the sharpest object of a movement led by older men; but the wager was placed on a path the movement had asked for, and it was embraced at once. A real turn at modest cost.
Score: 8.0 / 10
After its survival, this is the work’s strongest axis. Change the form and it knows nothing. Described in words, a cup covered in fur is a joke; made, it is a sensation of the mouth that the body cannot refuse. The form is the instrument. The fur must be on a cup and a spoon, not a plate or a knife, because those are the things that meet the lips; it must be laid smoothly so that the vessel stays legible as a vessel, which is what makes the transgression felt; it must be pale and short so that it reads as skin rather than costume. It does through touch imagined by sight what only an object can do. Held at 8.5 because the knowledge, once felt, is one thing, and the photograph carries much of it without loss.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence over promise: ninety years of return. The object has been read as the emblem of the Surrealist object; through psychoanalysis, as fetish and displaced sexual image; by feminist criticism from the 1970s on, as a woman’s object about the female body at table, and about a woman artist eclipsed by one famous work; and in studies of touch and the senses in modern art. The questions renew: whether the work is erotic or a refusal of the erotic, comic or disturbing, Oppenheim’s or the group’s whose title it carries. Held below 8 because return to the object yields the same shudder again. The well lies chiefly in readings of gender and of the movement, and the thing itself is soon known.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Published, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of Paris and the Surrealist movement of the 1930s and its successors. The intrinsic force is not a reorganisation of what a work can be, since the readymade and the Surrealist object both existed; it is a culmination and a purification of the Surrealist object, the one most others are measured by, and the first major work of the movement to make touch its medium. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: its place in the Museum of Modern Art made it a textbook example of the movement, and the domestic uncanny in later sculpture, the furred and soft objects of later decades and feminist art’s return to the domestic object are often traced to it in general accounts; no particular later work is documented as taking it for its start, and the reach is discounted for that. A wide emblem with diffuse descent.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at ninety years, which gives the row from seventy years to two centuries. Form: the three parts stand together and legible as a service; no loss of a part is on record, though the history of its conservation is thinly known. Presence: in the Museum of Modern Art, reproduced in nearly every account of Surrealism and of modern sculpture; fame is presence, not proof. Fabric: fur on cup, saucer and spoon, a perishable material sensitive to light that cannot be renewed without becoming another object, the most fragile fabric of any work in its class. The span and the presence would allow a higher figure in the row; the fragility of the fabric, the smallest charge, holds it at the foot.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Read to the same anchors as every medium. The making is a set of exact decisions with a real hand in them, more than the readymade has. Credited: the choice of a plain cup, saucer and spoon of ordinary design, so that nothing in the form distracts; the choice of the fur, pale and short, with the nap laid so that the vessel’s line survives under it; the covering of the spoon, whose bowl and handle are clothed without losing their shape; the proportion of the set as laid, the spoon across the saucer. These decisions are load-bearing and fine. But the medium commanded is narrow: the forms are bought, the covering is a craft of gluing and fitting, and the maker’s hand shows only in the fit. Above Fountain for the made part; below the works whose making is the carrying load.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the hard glazed vessel, made for washing and for the mouth, and the soft hide, made for the animal and for warmth. One law governs them: the surface of the body is laid where the body must not be, and every part obeys it. The cup, which the lip touches; the spoon, which the tongue meets; the saucer, which the fingers hold: each is furred to the same degree, smoothly, without exception or ornament, so that no part breaks the law or merely decorates it. Even the second title keeps it, setting a meal beside a pelt. Held near 8 because narrowness is not coherence: the law governs three small objects and one material, and the range between the farthest elements, sharp as it is, is small.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The orders held are few, and held in one gesture. The body: the mouth, the skin, the sexual body under the domestic. Nature: the animal, hunted, its hide on the table. The domestic and its manners: the service, the afternoon, a class’s ritual of civility. Gender: a woman’s table, a woman’s object, carried in the form and drawn out by readers. They are integrated, since one material touches them all at once. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no person, no history, no labour except by implication, no state, no sacred order, no world beyond the table. It stands a little above Fountain for the body and the animal, which are present in the thing and not only in its reception. The figure describes the form, a small set of things.
Score: 6.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Living Form at 8.5, The Inevitable at 8.1 and The Inner Law at 8.1. Ninety years in one museum and in nearly every account of its movement, in a perishable skin that cannot be renewed; a form that does what no statement of its idea can, a recoil of the mouth made by one material on three bought things; parts that are all required; and one law, the body’s surface laid where the body must not be, obeyed by every part without exception.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.3: the body, the animal, the domestic and gender are held in one gesture; persons, history, labour, the state and the sacred are absent. Next above it, The Sublime at 7.3: one effect, a shiver, sharp and repeatable and met in one register. Then The Archetypal Deep and The Made at 7.7: the vessel made flesh is built and the rest evoked by a title; the decisions are exact, and the forms are bought and the hand shows only in the fit. Then The Unconcealment at 7.8: a meaning felt more than uncovered, and stated beforehand by the movement’s programme.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 7.7, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.0, Pressure on Tradition at 7.9, The Unconcealment at 7.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.7 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.3, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.3. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 94.3, an average of 7.86 that displays 7.9. The work stands where its aggregate places it: at the top of Tier III, a tenth short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and well short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the object from the museum’s record and from long familiarity with its image, not from handling it: well as an image and in its essential facts, thinly in the history of its conservation, so that where a judgment turns on its condition it is held more loosely. The work scored is the one assemblage made in Paris in 1936, a cup, saucer and spoon each covered in fur, as one work with its title, in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The photographs of it and the artist’s other works are context and are not scored. The title Object is the one the museum gives; the attribution of Le Déjeuner en fourrure to André Breton is reported, not certain, and is stated so. No words are quoted but the titles. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the animal whose fur was used, the dimensions of the three parts, where and when the object was first shown, how and in what year it entered the museum, its exhibition in New York, later versions or multiples of it, its condition and any conservation, how often it is lent, the artist’s own view of its fame, and the story often told of how the idea arose.