The Curious Case of Meret Oppenheim’s Furry Teacup

See below for a transcript of the SoundCloud audio.

Narrator, Arlette Hernandez: What makes you curious?

Conservation Scientist Kyna Biggs: One thing that sparks my curiosity is having so many different people asking the same question from different perspectives.

Curator Anne Umland: Working in a museum, I can say one of the things that most frequently sparks my curiosity is how works of art came to be.

Conservator Caitlin Gozo Richeson: My curiosity is driven by care. Anytime something comes in front of me—before I even look at it, before I dig into the who, the how, the why—I just take a moment to remember that it was important enough to somebody that they made it. So my job is to care for it the best I can.

AH: Welcome to The Museum of Modern Art’s Magazine Podcast. I’m Arlette Hernandez and I work in the Museum’s Department of Learning and Engagement, where my job is basically asking people lots of questions. So, in this episode, we’re going to meet three people I work with who also love to ask questions. And we’ll discover how their curiosity led them towards uncovering a decades-long mystery surrounding the making of one of MoMA’s most celebrated works of art.

AU: My name is Anne Umland. I was a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture here at The Museum of Modern Art.

CGR: I am Caitlin Gozo Richeson, and I am an assistant objects conservator at the Museum of Modern Art.

KB: And I’m Kyna Biggs. I am the David Booth Fellow in Conservation Science here at MoMA as well.

AH: If you’re anything like me, you might be wondering what it means to be a conservator or conservation scientist at a museum. So I asked Caitlin and Kyna to tell us a bit about what they do.

CGR: As an objects conservator, I am responsible for all of the three dimensional artworks within the museum’s collection. We have to, essentially, examine every artwork and understand the object’s condition. Different materials will respond differently to environments—to light, to temperature, and to humidity.

Often when I am looking at an object, my first thoughts are always, What is it? What is it made of? Sometimes I can’t tell that just by sight, and I would go to a conservation scientist to help me determine that.

KB: What a conservation scientist does is [use] different types of analytical techniques to figure out what an artwork might be made out of, if any sort of degradation is happening, and maybe figuring out the cause of the degradation. And then always working really closely with conservators to figure out how our analysis and our results might be able to help them in their treatment, or for any sort of preventive measures.

CGR: Conservators can only know so much. It’s really helpful to talk with scientists about it. So Kyna, she helps me inform Anne and make my recommendations about certain things.

AH: But it was more than their different roles at the Museum that brought Anne, Caitlin, and Kyna together. It was a sculpture they’ve all loved for years.

Picture this: a plain white teacup sitting atop a saucer with a metal spoon resting off to the side. It’s the type of object you might encounter at a cafe or in your grandmother’s home. The surfaces are all smooth and shiny. Maybe even cool to the touch if it hasn’t been filled with hot liquid yet.

Now take that object, cover it entirely with fur, and you have one of the most curious artworks in MoMA’s collection: Meret Oppenheim’s Object, from 1936.

AU: Do I remember my first encounter with Meret Oppenheim’s Object? I think my first encounter was in the pages of an art history textbook. It is an object that—once you’ve seen it, it’s there in your imagination forever. And somehow that just monumentalized it to me in my memory. And then you encounter it—the physical thing—it was so much smaller than I had imagined. It’s actual size! It’s a real-life teacup and saucer, little spoon.

KB: In a similar vein, I remember [a] professor talking to us about how it’s supposed to subvert that usefulness. Imagine trying to drink from the teacup, and it is just...covered in this fur!

CGR: Object really became synonymous with the Surrealist movement. I remember the day that it was taught to us, and I remember being struck because art history thus far, women were mentioned so few and far between, and they were almost never the ones that had artwork that defined a movement.

AH: Surrealism was an artistic and literary movement developed in 1924. The artists in this movement were all about curiosity. Many were asking questions that began with “What if…” Others sought to explore the uncharted depths of their imagination and the subconscious mind. And a lot of them devised radical experiments that redefined what we even consider as “art.” This year marks the 100th anniversary of Surrealism.

CGR: As I got older, I came to appreciate it in many different ways. I thought of it as this bold statement for such an intimate object. It’s the everyday, it’s your teacup, your plate, your spoon. And it’s made by this woman who is literally denying that function of use, and it’s always stuck in my head for that reason—that big statement that she made quietly.

AU: Meret Oppenheim was an artist who made so many different types of work. And the constants, I think, the through lines for Meret Oppenheim were, that she had a tremendous sense of humor and play. She was very interested in dreams and in death and nature. She loved experimenting with all sorts of different materials. And she was also an artist who was rather keenly attuned to the predicament of being a woman and an artist who wanted to be taken seriously in a man’s world in her time.

AH: A few years ago, Anne organized a retrospective of Oppenheim’s work at MoMA.

AU: As is often the case with exhibitions here at the Museum that include collection objects, it’s such a wonderful opportunity to revisit them with fresh eyes. The teacup has been in The Museum of Modern Art since 1936, so it seemed like an ideal opportunity. We’re doing this retrospective, let’s look at the fur teacup and its saucer and spoon again, all of us, and see if there are new questions to ask. And in fact, the new question was the old question: what is the fur that covers it?

And I think specifically, there had been a book published recently, and there is a footnote that said the Museum’s conservation department had looked at the fur teacup and had said definitively it is not Chinese gazelle—which is a detail in this artist questionnaire that Meret Oppenheim sent to the Musuem. But then that book said what it was had yet to be determined.

And so I asked Caitlin. [laughs]

CGR: Yeah, I think I was in the gallery with Anne overseeing the deinstallation, and I think you just asked me off the cuff, “What fur is it?” And I said, “Oh, it should be really easy to figure out.” [laughs]

AU: I’m remembering, so I had always been told as a curator that the object could no longer travel. Because every time it moves, it sheds. And I guess when Caitlin and I were in the gallery for it to be carefully transported, I thought, well, maybe it was going to shed a hair that then could provide a clue for some scientific analysis. So I have some memory of saying, “Oh, if a hair falls off, can you take that hair and analyze it?” Because it seemed like an opportunity that we wouldn’t have another time.

CGR: Absolutely. I should say, too, that, you know, we don’t tend to take samples from artworks unless there’s good cause.

AU: But having heard this story, thought why not? Anyway, that’s how it all began.

CGR: Yeah.

AH: What unfolded from this encounter in the galleries is a mystery that went on to stump not only curators and conservators, but scientists of all kinds—like Kyna, and even some forensic scientists who help solve crimes.

CGR: In conservation graduate school, we go through courses for microscopy and identifying pigments and hairs and fibers. Just seeing the characteristics under the microscope, you can identify them. So I figured, at the start, that I could just look at it myself and try to figure that out.

It was early in Kyna’s time here, and I learned about her biological background. And she happened to be in the lab at the same time as when the teacup was coming, so I thought, might as well ask her too. I think we all thought it was gonna be a very quick answer though. [laughs]

KB: Yes, yeah. So in graduate school I went through a similar training for looking at different materials under the microscope and starting to do identification that way. And then in the work positions I had before coming to MoMA, that was my specialty. From my understanding, that wasn’t really done at MoMA much before I came here, and it was, “Oh, Kyna’s done a lot of this. Could you take a look at this hair?” And yes, we both thought it was going to be quite straightforward and turned out not to be. I think both Caitlin and I were a bit overly confident that microscopy would be the first and only analysis technique that we would use.

CGR: We were very confident about that. I think many people who would be trying to do a similar identification project would start there. Not every institution, not every science lab has the techniques that we ended up using, but many have a microscope, so it’s a very approachable technique to understand some of the basic characteristics.

KB: A strand of hair has some distinct characteristics that we can start to look at. So. on the outside of the hair are what we call scales. Think of a fish scale, it’s the same idea. So the shape, the frequency, the size of the scales—those are all things that can start to indicate what kind of an animal it could be from.

Within the middle of the hair is something we call a medulla, and it’s just an air cavity that goes through, and it can have also a distinct pattern depending on the species. So it can sometimes look just like a rod going through it. It can look sometimes like a ladder or little blocks stacked on top of each other with a little bit of space in between them. Those characteristics will help us start to see, maybe this is a fox or a deer or whatnot.

I will say that, even though microscopy didn’t give us the exact answer we were looking for, it was still a very powerful technique because we were able to rule out a lot of options. Especially things that had already been linked to the object in its history. There was passed around this idea of a deer, maybe a white-tailed deer. We were able to rule that out pretty easily with microscopy. There was also the book that stated that it might have been a cat as well—and that was a quote from Meret Oppenheim—and we were able to rule that out pretty easily.

But since we didn’t have an answer, we decided then to go onto these more detailed techniques that aren’t really typical in most conservation science labs. And so we looked at DNA, which is just taking the genetic information from either the hair or the pelt and seeing if we can identify it through that.

CGR: And for that we partnered with John Jay College of Criminal Justice, with Dr. Nathan Lentz, Director of Molecular Biology, and a graduate student that he identified, Selin Ates, who made this project her senior thesis. So she was the one that was really studying how to extract the DNA and sequence it so that it would yield usable information for us.

KB: That turned out to be a lot more complicated because we had all of these issues. The hair is quite old—it’s almost a hundred years old. DNA degradation happens most rapidly within the first hundred years. It has been on display, we found out, pretty much its entire life. And so things like light, UV radiation, humidity, temperature, touching, all of these things can introduce contaminations, can speed up the degradation of the DNA.

CGR: Yeah, I think we wrote back to Anne at that point and we’re like, we definitely are gonna get it now, we’re doing DNA analysis. [laughs]

KB: Yes.

AU: Yes, I loved getting your emails! They would come months in between, but I was like, wow, DNA analysis, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, they are really going for this!

And we all thought [they are going to solve this], right?

CGR: Yeah, we really did.

But yeah, as Kyna said, the actual object, as Meret Oppenheim composed it, is almost a hundred years old. But we don’t know how old that pelt was before she got it, and we don’t know how it was handled or prepared for use. So, those are all factors of contamination that complicate our analysis.

KB: Because we had a second technique that we were still pursuing, but was turning out to be a little bit more difficult than we anticipated, we started to think about what other research avenues we could maybe go on that might yield a better result.

CGR: Dr. Daniel Kirby, he is an independent scientist I believe at this point, but he came to my graduate school to show us this certain technique that he specializes in.

KB: He’s a specialist in this technique called MALDI-TOF PMF, which, this is gonna be a mouthful, but: Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight peptide mass fingerprinting.

What that huge jumble of words means, essentially, is we are specifically targeting the collagen protein, which is found in the skin. And this technique is able to target the collagen from a skin sample and break that down into the individual proteins and amino acids that it’s made up of. Each animal will have a different grouping or fingerprint of those amino acids or those proteins. And so by doing this technique, we can get a unique sequence that we can then compare to known animals and then do an identification on.

What’s great about this technique is for all of the complications that come with the aging and the deterioration of the DNA, it doesn’t really affect the collagen. And so hopefully we wouldn’t have that same issue of “we can’t get a good yield of information to even start to look at a comparison.”

AU: So you applied this form of analysis to the cup?

KB: To the teacup, yes. And I will say, since we were talking about sampling, this does require taking a sample of the hide, and we did have to get approval. But what’s great about this technique as well is it requires so little sample, something that could sit on the tip of a pin, maybe.

CGR: Just to show how powerful this technique is, we also gave a sample of the adhesive that Meret Oppenheim used, and Dr. Kirby was able to identify that it was a fish glue, but specifically a fish glue that was made from Atlantic Cod.

I can explain a little bit about why we pivoted to MALDI-TOF PMF. We did the DNA testing first before we ever even reached out to Dr. Kirby. Dr. Lentz, essentially, did a run of DNA and the primary result was human contamination, which is not really a surprise because it’s almost a hundred years old. We have archival photos of the artist handling the object and like, miming drinking out of it. All through its life, it probably has some transfer of human DNA.

In a subsequent run, he found other things that we were really excited about at first...

KB: There were other contaminants that were providing a DNA source, and human was a big part of it. Bacterial DNA was large part of it as well, which again, makes sense. Bacteria are everywhere. That’s not surprising. But other things such as fungi that are specific to wheat rot, some livestock, so cow or pig. Dog was also found in that as well. We also identified banana DNA, which I think all of us were very surprised at. I know I laughed out loud at my desk when I read that.

CGR: I think I did too.

KB: It was incredible. But again, the images we have of Meret Oppenheim handling it, it’s not wild for me to imagine, you eat something, you might not wash your hands, especially if it’s a banana or a sandwich or whatnot, and then you’re touching something. Cross-contamination can happen so easily.

And then the thing we found that we got really excited about was a specific nematode—which is like a parasitic worm—that was specifically parasitizing Spanish red deer. That’s what it’s known for.

CGR: And then I sent the email to Anne prematurely and was like, we did it!

KB: We were very excited.

AU: Spanish red deer!

CGR: It’s been cracked!

KB: Yeah! Because we thought, alright, we found this nematode that only is attached to a very specific mammal species. And I knew from microscopy that it looked similar to something that was related to a deer. So this kind of felt like a confirmation of that.

CGR: And I will say too, like, it made more sense in my brain that Meret Oppenheim would have access to a pelt from a specific Spanish deer than from a Chinese gazelle. In my mind, I just couldn’t marry the two. So I thought, this is it, this is definitely what it was. But we learned a lot about the limitations of DNA sequencing in this process.

KB: Yeah. Most scientific techniques are built on a reference library. That’s how we’re able to do identification with certainty. But when you have a reference library that is incredibly limited to a handful of species, let’s say, and the number of references for those few species are so numerous, it’s so easy to have what appears to be a partial match to something and that not actually be the case. It’s the computer program that’s running your sample against these reference libraries doing its best to match it to what it has available. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be correct.

We were so excited about the nematode, and at that point, I believe we had already sent samples for MALDI analysis.

CGR: Yes.

KB: And I think they came in rather soon after and we thought, it’s fine. He’s gonna say, it’s a Spanish red deer. We’re golden. We did it, we’ve cracked it.

Dr. Kirby came back with, “We’re not getting a perfect match.” Okay... “But what is closest matching is something that’s called the Kirk’s dik-dik.” And I thought, “Well, that’s not a Spanish red deer! That sucks. It’s not a deer!” [laughs]

Looked up what a Kirk’s dik-dik is and where it comes from, and it’s a small antelope species. It’s not from China, it is from Africa. And it looks nothing like a Spanish red deer. It’s completely different. And also looking at the relationship of those animals to each other, they’re not very closely related. It’s a lot of difference between a deer and a dik-dik!

CGR: Dr. Kirby didn’t have anything in his reference library that perfectly matched ours. But what led him to believe that it closely matched it to a dik-dik was one specific marker that’s not seen in very many animals, so he was able to give us a smaller grouping to begin to investigate.

KB: So that specific marker was actually able to rule out all deer species and all North American species that could also be closely related to a deer. So something like a moose or a caribou or a reindeer, those sorts of things. He was very confidently able to rule all of those out because they’ve already been characterized by that technique and none of them have that very specific marker. From that, he was able to give us a bit of a direction of okay, maybe Kirk’s dik-dik, but also similar species that are more closely related to the Kirk’s dik-dik, which tend to be things that are within the gazelle family, and they can range from Africa and Asia. So, we were kind of being shoved back into that direction of it being a Chinese gazelle actually.

CGR: And then at this point, I felt like I wasn’t contributing very much [laughs] with all of the science, and I was thinking, what is the data actually telling us, and is there anything historically that could possibly help us interpret it or support anything? I also started to look back at, why did I question it was a Chinese gazelle then? Maybe it really could be a Chinese gazelle.

So I started doing a lot of research into the history of the fur trade, especially in Paris and Asia, to understand, were they even killing these animals and processing them specifically for fur? Right now, what we know as the true Chinese gazelle is the Przewalski’s gazelle, and they’re critically endangered. I didn’t know if, at the time that this was collected, that was still true. Would it have been that difficult to get a number of these pelts from China, from Mongolia, to Paris?

What I really found was that there was an extremely large and profitable company in Paris that established outposts in the east, specifically in Mongolia, and on the border of Mongolia and Northern China. In researching the fur trade out of Mongolia where the most prominent outposts were for trading for this company, I realized that yes, actually, both the Przewalski’s gazelle and the Mongolian gazelle were harvested for their pelts. In fact, in the 1920s, there was a huge spike in the export of animal products from Mongolia, and one of the hardest hit populations for them was the Mongolian gazelle, which is closely related to the Przewalski’s gazelle or the Chinese gazelle.

So there were all of these pieces that were starting to fit together. I still felt like, why would they travel this all the way to Europe? And so I started researching the fashion trends of fur at the time. I found that there was a brief period in the 1920s to the early 1930s where gazelle skin coats were really popular. So it became commercially appealing to import a lot of different gazelle skins. And then they fell out of fashion, actually, around 1934, 1936, which is around the time Object was made. Gazelle skin coats fell out of fashion because women were complaining that they were shedding. They were still in the country and the material was still being imported, but now it’s much cheaper.

All of these historic pieces started to come together for me as we waited for further results. And on the other side, Kyna was leading more sampling from other collections.

KB: With the results that we had gotten at that point from all three analysis techniques, and with the information Caitlin was able to gather—even though we didn’t have an answer, a story was starting to form. And the way we’re going with this research is really informed by the data we’re collecting, but also from the art historical and history portion of this story.

From all of these facets, I started to reach out, with Caitlin’s help, to different natural history museum collections. Because where might we get samples of these animals that have not been characterized by any of these three analytical techniques? Natural history collections have a lot of animal skins in their collection, from a lot of different species from a lot of different regions.

CGR: And they’re intended to be studied. Some of them were collected as far back as the early 1900s, and so we could find specimen that corresponded to the general timeframe that we were looking at, which was really interesting.

KB: Yeah, and I will note, all of the animals in this small subsection in that gazelle family from Africa and from Asia are either extremely endangered, some are extinct, or they’re very vulnerable currently. We wouldn’t be able to access them in any other way except for reaching out to these natural history museums.

AU: Is it an oversimplification to say that you needed to reach out to the natural history museums for samples because the reference libraries are inherently biased for certain populations and parts of the world?

KB: That is exactly it.

CGR: All of our analysis was coming to a halt because we didn’t have references to compare to, so we couldn’t give an accurate identification because that information just wasn’t there. I mean, shockingly, deer and gazelle species aren’t widely DNA sequenced. Partly because of their status, but also because there’s so many different species. So, it’s a huge undertaking to build out those libraries themselves.

AU: Mm-hmm.

KB: So with that in mind, we have partnered a lot with the American Museum of Natural History, collecting hair and skin samples from these specimens that are known. We’ve been sending them to our collaborators at John Jay and to Dr. Kirby, and each of us, respectively, have been collecting data to build out our libraries in the hopes that we’ll actually be able to get a very firm species identification for the teacup.

AU: Fascinating. I love that there was a skepticism about what the artist had said, and nothing would make me happier than that in the end, it’s to underscore that we should have been taking her word a lot more seriously.

I mean, that said, Meret Oppenheim is the one responsible for saying, “Oh, it’s a cat!” But in that artist questionnaire that she sent to the museum, she was being serious, I think.

CGR: Absolutely. I’m totally on board with you. At first, I thought that there was no possible way that she would’ve had access to this, and that was my own bias coming into play, thinking that I had a great understanding of world trade and fur trade [laughs]. And specifically, what would be available to this artist at this time. But it’s entirely plausible at this point that it is a Chinese gazelle or that it is a species that’s from Asia or Africa.

There’s a lot of connecting the dots and waiting for those to be verified, but that story of how these materials found their way to her is still really interesting to me.

AH: So...mystery solved?

CGR: [laughs]

KB: We’re not done yet. The future of this research is collecting more of those samples from known specimens closely related to the animals we’re thinking it could possibly be, and doing the analysis on those samples with all three of the techniques. It’s my great hope, and I think we will, be able to then get a good confirmation and a good match of the data, hopefully of all three techniques, but at least of one or two, to give us an idea of what animal it is.

AU: And does that have implications for the conservation, for the preservation of this object into the future?

CGR: It depends, really, on the species. Because of how species have evolved, their hair characteristics are different from one another. A lot of Asian gazelle species only have hair that are guard hairs, and those are ones that we as conservators know will shed. And there’s nothing really you can do to prevent that from happening beyond reducing handling and travel.

Unfortunately, that would then confirm that the teacup couldn’t travel, but it also gives us an explanation as to why it’s shedding so much, that maybe it’s not as advanced in its degradation as we thought, but that it’s an inherent quality of this animal.

AH: Hearing Anne, Caitlin, and Kyna share this story, I was amazed at how many paths they went down just from asking a single question. I wanted to know what curiosity meant to them and how this experience has helped them tap into that feeling.

CGR: Curiosity to me is...that indescribable itch to know more, not necessarily with a cause, but because you are genuinely interested in whatever your interest is. For me, thinking in relation to artworks, it’s what is it? How was it made? What are the materials? What was the artist thinking about when they combined these materials? Was this unique? Did more people do this?

KB: In my day-to-day life, I have to be curious. Because especially working in a modern art collection, there’s numerous things, infinite things that something can be made out of. There are no limits. So just approaching it with what, why, how—those kind of questions can actually build out an even more interesting and more complete story than what you may have started off with. It’s that drive to just wanna know more and that willingness to go down a rabbit hole and enjoy that. I find a lot of curiosity is also equivalent to a lot of joy,

AU: Well, I think it’s always curiosity that leads me to want to collaborate with conservators and conservation scientists. And I think over the years I have always discovered that you never, ever are going to have all the answers, and that the joy, I agree, it is the joy, is in the journey and almost that process of questioning.

CGR: As you were saying that, I was thinking of like, curiosity is this genuine exchange of care, right? Because you wouldn’t be curious about something unless you cared about it.

AU: Curiosity is empathy too, right? You want to know something about something that isn’t you. So it’s like an openness to the world and to learning about things that are different and complicated and sometimes funny and amusing.

KB: And I think this was a great project that showed that. We had this idea in mind, we had our own biases that we brought to the project, unknowingly, unwillingly. And we had this overconfidence, and I think a lot of those things—on my side, at least, I don’t wanna speak for anyone else—made it harder to let that kind of curiosity take over. The process forced me to go back to that and let that guide me, and it became more fruitful once I did that.

CGR: This project really humbled me into not approaching everything as if I am the source of knowledge, that there’s so much more to learn than what I’m bringing to the table.

KB: And this has a lot of implications for this project and my practice going forward as a conservation scientist, but I think also just outside of work—allowing myself to be more open. People talk about kids being really curious and just asking questions all the time, maybe embracing that a little bit more as an adult, even.

AU: Being comfortable with not knowing and using that as a catalyst for always continuing to want to learn more is a pretty great way to think about approaching your profession or your personal life, too. So…did it change me? It’s a reminder to always be open that way and it’s really easy to forget.

CGR: Yeah…

AH: As we grow older, we might lose some of those qualities that made us kids. The responsibilities of everyday life make it hard to approach the world with curiosity. I mean, how can we wonder about a furry teacup when we barely even have time to make a cup of tea?

But as Anne, Caitlin, and Kyna have shown us, amazing things can happen when we lean into our curiosity. And artworks give us a chance to explore this feeling.

So the next time you see something that makes you curious, try spending some time with it. Who knows, you might even discover something new.

This episode was produced, edited, and mixed by Arlette Hernandez, with music by Chad Crouch and Blue Dot Sessions.

MoMA Audio is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.