“I will die before the first snow falls,” Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim, 72, told her friends on her birthday. She based her belief on a dream she had when she was 36 and the skeleton was pointing at a half-filled hourglass. He took it as a sign and never forgot. She died a month later, on November 15, 1985. She always believed in dreams, and at the beginning of her journey, she was so attuned to the surrealists. During her teenage years, she reverently wrote them down, making drawings inspired by them in her diaries. These and gothic tales fueled her imagination.

He left school in Basel in 1931 and left for Paris the following year to continue his advanced study of painting. He meets the circle of surrealists (Man Ray, Giacometti, Breton, Arp) and from the very beginning makes it clear that he is not going to be content with the role of a model or a muse. “I was creating surrealist works before the term was coined,” he said. In early 1936, he arranged a date for Picasso and Dore Maar at the famous Café de Flore. She wears an imposing fur-lined bracelet she made herself, and she walks towards them. She gets great reviews for the jewelry and explains that she thought of many other items she could “dress up” with the soft material. “Waiter, another mech,” he called confidently.

Throughout her journey, she supported the androgynous style – she advocated that a person should have both masculine and feminine principles.

A few days later he buys a cup and saucer and a sugar spoon. He wraps it all in light, shaved fur and names the project “The Object.” The choice was not accidental, and fine china and furs were synonymous with the life of a good society. In her interviews, she stated that she was intrigued by the contrast between the two materials, the surrealists, who immediately accepted the work, “read” in it a conflict between civilization and animal instincts. Breton renamed it, giving it the more descriptive name “Breakfast in Furs”, and included it in an exhibition of surrealist work. She made a splash, and it showed because her glassware went to a landmark exhibition on surrealism and the Dada movement organized by the MoMA in 1936.

Later, the museum acquired this work, which today is considered one of the most emblematic works of the radical movement. It is unfair, however, to perpetuate the memory of an artist with such prophetic, anarchist thinking and such scope of action for one work created by her at the age of 22, say the curators of the retrospective exhibition Meret Oppenheim. My exhibition”, which took place today at MoMA (until March 4) on the occasion of the 110th anniversary of her birth.

The organizers borrowed her phrase from 1975 and thus invite us to get acquainted with her multifaceted work and her uncompromising spirit. “No one will give you freedom. You must take it yourself.” More than 180 works – paintings, drawings, sculptures, objects, jewelry and collages – demonstrate her rebellious humor and how she approached art and every expression of it, be it design, fashion, public space. She has championed an androgynous style throughout her career. He argued that a person has both male and female principles. She stubbornly refused to take part in exhibitions where only female artists are represented. It exacerbates the problem, he thought, not solves it. At the Basel awards, she was teased with the term “female artist” and remarked: “When you speak a new language that others have to learn, it can take some time before you get an answer.”