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A special document from the ADA archive is this handwritten message from the artist Meret Oppenheim to her gallery owner Erica Brausen, written on 20 December 1971. The front of the message shows a black and white photograph of two handcrafted snake heads. The text of the message reads: "Dear Erica, these cunning snakes should keep all evil away from you and only let the good, i.e. everything you wish for, come to you. Your Meret". As can be seen from this and other correspondence between Meret Oppenheim and Erica Brausen, the two friends and free spirits had more in common than just a business relationship.

Meret Oppenheim grew up in a friendly, freedom-loving family. She was named after "little Meret", a character from the novel Der grüne Heinrich by Gottfried Keller. In the early 1930s, she moved to Paris, where she began her life as an independent artist and designer and formed friendships with artists such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp and André Breton. In Paris, she moved in the same circles as Erica Brausen.

Erica Brausen was born in Düsseldorf in 1908. After the Second World War, she became known as a gallery owner who represented avant-garde artists. Alongside Meret Oppenheim, she worked for example with René Magritte, Max Ernst, Man Ray and Alberto Giacometti. She met several of these artists in Paris from 1930 onwards. She lived there to escape the increasingly oppressive political atmosphere in Germany.

From the mid-1930s, Erica Brausen lived in Spain, on Mallorca, and helped persecuted people to flee during the Spanish Civil War. Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, she left the country herself. After the troubled war years, she set up her Hanover Gallery in London in 1947, which she ran with increasing success until 1973. Erica Brausen died there in 1992.

Text: Eleni Trupis, Archivist