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.