Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure)

The title 'Le Déjeuner en fourrure' (often translated as 'Object' or 'The Fur Lunch') is most famously associated with Méret Oppenheim's 1936 sculpture—a teacup, saucer, and spoon covered in fur—now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This catalog entry attributes a different work to Marcel Duchamp, describing a 1917 piece combining a fur coat with a urinal, which conflates themes from Duchamp's 'Fountain' with Oppenheim's iconic surrealist object.

Duchamp's 'Fountain,' submitted to the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition under the pseudonym R. Mutt, was a porcelain urinal presented as art, and it remains one of the most controversial works of the 20th century. The catalog's description of 'Object' incorporating a urinal suggests a deliberate echo of 'Fountain,' extending the readymade strategy into more overtly absurd territory.

The work is associated with Surrealism, a movement that sought to channel the unconscious mind through unexpected, dreamlike juxtapositions of everyday objects. Duchamp's readymades heavily influenced the Dada movement of the 1910s and 1920s, which directly paved the way for Surrealism's embrace of the absurd and irrational.

Oppenheim's fur-covered teacup is on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, while Duchamp's 'Fountain' exists primarily as replicas, with notable versions at the Tate Modern in London and the Musée national d'art moderne Centre Pompidou in Paris. Many of Duchamp's original readymades were lost, making these later authorized reproductions the primary way the public encounters the work.