The title Entropvisions is in homage to my mother, the poet and art critic, Harriet Zinnes. In 1990 New Directions published a collection of her poems titled Entropisms, a word she made-up combining entropy - the tendency toward disorder - and tropism - the growth towards or away from a stimulus. Similarly, my short reviews combine entropy and tropism by suggesting growth towards a vision of art from the chaos of the art world. Through the back door, my title also pays homage to my physicist father, Irving Zinnes, whose long discussions with my mom got her thinking about entropy and tropism in the first place.

Meret Oppenheim at MOMA, Louise Bourgeois at Marlborough
2023.3.14
Regrettably, I waited until the last minute to see the Meret Oppenheim show at MOMA, and so now must write about it after it closed. I’d procrastinated going because, quite honestly, I’d never been interested in Oppenheim, and to the degree I thought about her at all, thought of her work as a gimmicky game. I was so wrong! The more I walked through her artistic life, the more I saw just how serious, dedicated and smart she had been. With incredible invention, I felt she consistently conveyed an authentic anger towards the sexual mistreatment of women, anger towards society’s violence against women. The art from her years in self-imposed exile from Paris during World War II – she returned to her native Switzerland for security, as she was Jewish – was a powerful statement of existential confusion over her place in the world, of women’s and in fact all humanity’s place in the world, and ultimately the horrors of war.  And in her final pieces, made towards the end of her life, I felt a palpable fear and sadness of the inevitable mortality creeping over her. but also, a hope towards the greater joining and connection to the cosmos. Soon after seeing the Oppenheim show, I visited the small, focused exhibition of Louis Bourgeoise prints at Marlborough, and was struck how these two European-born women artists of the same generation devoted much of their work to the difficult plight of women, but how different were their expressions. Though both artists were exceedingly clever with visual metaphor, Oppenheim remained cerebral, external and global in outlook, while Bourgeoise was guts, emotion and intensely personal. Admittedly, I respond to Bourgeoise much more than to Oppenheim, but now at least respect what Meret Oppenheim had done. To my eyes, that fuzzy teacup is not just a cute fuzzy teacup, but a statement of and against the enforced silence and imprisonment by the male world on womanhood.

Oppenheim, 1942

Oppenheim,1934

Oppenheim, 1933

Oppenheim, 1938

Oppenheim, 1939

Oppenheim, 1943

Oppenheim, 1961

Oppenheim, 1961

Oppenheim, 1964-82

Oppenheim, Self Portrait,

1964, printed 1981

Oppenheim, 1968

Oppenheim, 1970

Oppenheim, 1974

Oppenheim, 1975

Oppenheim, 1975

Oppenheim, 1977

Oppenheim, 1977

Oppenheim, 1980

Oppenheim, 1977

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois