Public Programs @ the Institute
Series: Walter W.S. Cook Annual Lecture
Anne Umland, Former Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Senior Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art
Meret Oppenheim’s Fur Cup on Display: The Clover-Leafed Napkin and Other Telling Tales
Friday, October 24, 2025, at 6:00pm
By invitation only.
The Institute of Fine Arts Alumni Association Board invites you to attend the ninth annual Alumni Weekend Lecture, featuring this year's Walter W.S. Cook Lecturer and distinguished alumna Dr. Anne Umland, PhD '97.
Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined cup is one of the best known and most widely reproduced works in twentieth-century modern art. Its enduring stature arises from the sublime absurdity of Oppenheim’s combination of nonart material— fur, teacup, saucer, and spoon—to produce an object that is simultaneously hilarious, erotic, and otherworldly. It is also a shining example of Surrealism’s new art, plucked from the everyday and transformed. Although today the place of Oppenheim’s Object (1936) in history is secure, this was not always the case, even at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it has resided since the year it was made.
This lecture reexamines Object’s richly complicated history, both within the Museum’s walls and without, by focusing on the artist’s gift to the Museum in 1975 of a napkin with a clover-leaf pattern, accompanied by the request that it be displayed with her fur-lined cup, a suggestion that curators at the time reportedly dismissed. This reaction recalled the Museum Trustees’ initial resistance to Object itself, along with the institution’s—and art history’s—historical discomfort with Dada and Surrealist objects, women’s art, domesticity, and the decorative arts. Today MoMA is a very different place from the one artist Martha Rosler famously dubbed the “Kremlin of Modernism” in the 1970s. Has the moment finally come to consider Oppenheim’s request that her napkin be shown “with the rest of the work”? By restoring the napkin to the conversation, this lecture argues, we uncover a more layered and critical narrative about authorship, intention, the politics of display, and Oppenheim’s own remarkably open conception of art.
Dr. Anne Umland is the former Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Senior Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 1997. Umland joined The Museum of Modern Art in 1996 as Assistant Curator. Throughout her time at MoMA she organized or co-organized numerous critically acclaimed exhibitions, including Picasso in Fontainebleau (2023), Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition (2022), Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction (2021), Francis Picabia: Our Heads Are Round So Our Thoughts Can Change Direction (2016), Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary (2014), and Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914 (2011). Dr. Umland contributed to the 2019 museum expansion and co-edited MoMA’s first digital-only publication, Picasso: The Making of Cubism 1912-1914 (2014). Her work and exhibitions have been reviewed in publications including The New York Times, ArtForum, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Time Out New York, Hyperallergic, and others. Dr. Umland has spoken about her projects on WNYC, Charlie Rose, PBS's NYC-ARTS, and MoMA’s YouTube channel. In 2022, Dr. Umland was awarded the Dedalus Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award and was a nominee for the Alice Award.
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