Elisabeth Mansén

Fingertip Knowledge : Meret Oppenheim on the Sense of Touch

ABSTRACT This article presents Meret Oppenheim (1913–85) as an artist and a writer who, with a special interest in the sense of touch, explored the relationship between the intellect and the senses. Associated with the surrealist movement, she created a language of the senses in close affinity with nature, art, intuition, and feeling. Her ambition to transcend the opposites of nature and culture, ancient and modern, animal and human, male and female, is expressed in her poetry as well as in her famous fur-lined cup, her hirsute objects, fantastic animals, stone women, bone gloves, and dysfunctional shoes, and her statements on sexual symbolism, cannibalism, and mortality are cleverly based on fingertip knowledge.