Meret Oppenheim (1913−1985)

Meret Oppenheim became familiar with the teachings of psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung through her father, the physician Erich Alphons Oppenheim, with the result that she sought to engage with her unconscious from an early age, recording her dreams and daydreams in diary-like notes. For Oppenheim, dreams, bring the products of  free, unpremeditated imagination, served as the key to exploring her inner life and her personal creativity. In that sense, her approach to them resembled that of the Surrealists. At the same time, and taking her cue from Jung, she recognised the potential of dreams for revealing ‘universal truths’. Dreams formed a reservoir of ideas for Oppenheim’s world of images and artistic procedures.

Das Geheimnis der Vegetation of 1972, a major work that entered the Kunstmuseum Bern’s collection when purchased by the Hermann and Margrit Rupf Foundation in 1982, belongs among the rare works in her oeuvre that are based on a specific dream. She had jotted it down in a ‘dream record’ twenty years earlier, the closing statement of which would provide the enigmatic title for the painting. Her note reads: ‘I was walking up a mountain on a stony path (it was the mountain of San Salvatore). I saw my friend Irène Zurkinden standing in some brightgreen

bushes flooded with sunlight. Her eyelashes and hair (which in reality are blond) also had a green sheen. I said: “I am the secret of vegetation”.’ On the basis of this experience of nature as seen in this dream, Oppenheim made a sketch in which the vertical and almost symmetrical composition anticipates the abstract vision of nature found in the final work. [...]

Whereas in the dream the mystery of nature is embodied by a woman, in the painting it is transformed into a white column linking earth and sky behind a mass of shimmering, light-suffused leaves. Two serpentine lines bearing patterns resembling snakes’ markings rise along the edges of this ‘statue’, as Oppenheim called it.7 Each of them ends in abstract sign – a blue eye-shape on the left, a white disk on the right. The artist explained that they stand for the poles formed by the two energy flows constantly pulsating through the universe: ‘plus and minus, life and death, yin and yang.’ [...]

Source: Masterpieces Kunstmuseum Bern, Ed. Matthias Frehner / Valentina Locatelli, München: Hirmer Publishers, 2016, Cat. No 131, p. 298 (author: Heike Eipeldauer)