Luncheon in Fur

André Breton called Méret’s provocative work, the quintessence of Surrealism, “Luncheon in Fur”. This art object has been analysed from different points of view and, owing to its privileged position as something that draws the “gaze” to itself, it gives rise to a multitude of associations and interpretations.

In psychoanalysis such an object is regarded as a fetish. While it has the status of a utilitarian item in everyday life, the cup is a libidinally charged object in the subject’s psychic reality, holding the status of objet a from the standpoint of Lacanian theory. The operation of “displacement”, carried out in the scopic field at the second time of the Oedipus complex, sets the structure of desire in a perverse logic. For such a subject, the sexual scene cannot take place without the fetish; the desired object is invariably present in the fantasy as a real thing.

Méret’s work skilfully captures the juncture between the perception of a teacup and saucer and what they are in the perverse fantasy. The cup thus becomes the centre of a sexual fantasy and recreates in the subject’s psychic life an image of what the fetish is in representation.