Claes Oldenburg (January 28, 1929 – July 18, 2022) was a Swedish-born American sculptor best known for his
public art installations, typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is
soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife,
Coosje van Bruggen, who died in 2009; they had been married for 32 years. Oldenburg lived and worked in New York City.
Early life and education
Claes Oldenburg was born on January 28, 1929, in
Stockholm,[3] the son of Gösta Oldenburg[4] and his wife Sigrid Elisabeth née Lindforss.[5] His father was then a Swedish diplomat stationed in New York and in 1936 was appointed consul general of Sweden to Chicago where Oldenburg grew up, attending the
Latin School of Chicago. He studied literature and art history at
Yale University[6] from 1946 to 1950, then returned to Chicago where he took classes at
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While further developing his craft, he worked as a reporter at the
City News Bureau of Chicago. He also opened his own studio and, in 1953, became a
naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1956, he moved to New York, and for a time worked in the library of the
Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration, where he also took the opportunity to learn more, on his own, about the history of art.[7]
Oldenburg's first recorded sales of artworks were[when?] at the
57th Street Art Fair in Chicago, where he sold 5 items for a total price of $25.[8] He moved back to New York City in 1956. There he met a number of artists, including
Jim Dine,
Red Grooms, and
Allan Kaprow, whose
happenings incorporated theatrical aspects and provided an alternative to the
abstract expressionism that had come to dominate much of the art scene. Oldenburg began toying with the idea of soft sculpture in 1957, when he completed a free-hanging piece made from a woman's stocking stuffed with newspaper. (The piece was untitled when he made it but is now referred to as Sausage.)[9]
By 1960, Oldenburg had produced sculptures containing simply rendered figures, letters, and signs, inspired by the
Lower East Side neighborhood where he lived, made out of materials such as cardboard,
burlap, and newspapers; in 1961, he shifted his method, creating sculptures from
chicken wire covered with plaster-soaked canvas and enamel paint, depicting everyday objects – articles of clothing and food items.[10] Oldenburg's first show which included three-dimensional works, in May 1959, was at the Judson Gallery, at
Judson Memorial Church on
Washington Square.[11] During this time, artist
Robert Beauchamp described Oldenburg as "brilliant", due to the reaction that the pop artist brought to a "dull" abstract expressionist period.[12]
In the 1960s, Oldenburg became associated with the
pop art movement and created many so-called happenings, which were performance art related productions of that time. The name he gave to his own productions was "Ray Gun Theater". The cast of colleagues who appeared in his performances included artists
Lucas Samaras,
Tom Wesselmann,
Carolee Schneemann,
Oyvind Fahlstrom and
Richard Artschwager, art gallerist
Annina Nosei, critic
Barbara Rose, and screenwriter
Rudy Wurlitzer.[9] His first wife (1960–1970) Patty Mucha[13] (Patricia Muchinski),[14] who sewed many of his early soft sculptures, KIDwas a constant performer in his happenings. His brash, often humorous, approach to art was at great odds with the prevailing sensibility that, by its nature,t with "profound" expressions or ideas. But Oldenburg's spirited art found first a niche then a great popularity that endures to this day. In December 1961, he rented a store on Manhattan's Lower East Side to house "The Store", a month-long installation he had first presented at the
Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, stocked with sculhly in the form of consumer goods.[9]
Oldenburg moved to Los Angeles in 1963 "because it was the most opposite thing to New York [he] could think of".[9] That same year, he conceived AUT OBO DYS, performed in the parking lot of the
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in December 1963. In 1965, he turned his attention to drawings and projects for imaginary outdoor monuments. Initially these monuments took the form of small collages such as a crayon image of a fat, fuzzy
teddy bear looming over the grassy fields of New York's
Central Park (1965)[15] and Lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus, London (1966).[16] In 1967, New York city cultural adviser
Sam Green realized Oldenburg's first outdoor public monument; Placid Civic Monument took the form of a Conceptual performance/action behind the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, with a crew of
gravediggers digging a 6-by-3-foot rectangular hole in the ground.[6] In 1969, Oldenberg contributed a drawing to the
Moon Museum. Geometric Mouse-Scale A, Black 1/6, also from 1969, was selected to be part of the
Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in
Albany, New York.[17]
Many of Oldenburg's large-scale sculptures of mundane objects elicited ridicule before being accepted. For example, the 1969 Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, was removed from its original place in
Beinecke Plaza at Yale University, and "circulated on a loan basis to other campuses".[18] English art critic Ellen H. Johnson says that with its "bright color, contemporary form and material and its ignoble subject, it attacked the sterility and pretentiousness of the classicistic building behind it". The artist "pointed out it opposed levity to solemnity, color to colorlessness, metal to stone, simple to a sophisticated tradition. In theme, it is both phallic, life-engendering, and a bomb, the harbinger of death. Male in form, it is female in subject".[18] One of a number of Oldenburg's sculptures that possess interactive capabilities, it now resides in the
Morse College courtyard.
From the early 1970s on, Oldenburg concentrated almost exclusively on public commissions.[16] His first public work, Three-Way Plug came on commission from
Oberlin College with a grant from the
National Endowment for the Arts.[19] His collaboration with Dutch/American writer and art historian
Coosje van Bruggen dates from 1976. They were married in 1977. Oldenburg officially signed all the work he did from 1981 on with both his own name and van Bruggen's.[9] Their first collaboration came when Oldenburg was commissioned to rework Trowel I, a 1971 sculpture of an oversize garden tool, for the grounds of the
Kröller-Müller Museum in
Otterlo in the Netherlands.[20]
In addition to freestanding projects, they occasionally contributed to architectural projects, among them, two Los Angeles projects in collaboration with architect
Frank Gehry: Toppling Ladder With Spilling Paint, which was installed at
Loyola Law School in 1986, and the building-mounted sculpture Giant Binoculars,[22] completed in
Venice Beach in 1991.[9] The couple's collaboration with Gehry also involved a return to performance for Oldenburg when the trio presented Il Corso del Coltello, in
Venice, Italy, in 1985; other characters were portrayed by
Germano Celant and
Pontus Hultén.[23] "Coltello" is the source of Knife Ship, a large-scale sculpture that served as the central prop; it was later seen in Los Angeles in 1988 when Oldenburg, van Bruggen and Gehry presented Coltello Recalled: Reflections on a Performance at the
Japanese American Cultural & Community Center and the exhibition Props, Costumes and Designs for the Performance "Il Corso del Coltello" at Margo Leavin Gallery.[9] He collaborated with English director Gerald Fox in 1996 to make a documentary about himself in association with The South Bank Show which was broadcast on
ITV.[24][25]
The city of
Milan, Italy, commissioned the work known as Needle, Thread and Knot (Italian: Ago, filo e nodo) which was installed in 2000 in the
Piazzale Cadorna.[26] In 2001, Oldenburg and van Bruggen created Dropped Cone, a huge inverted ice cream cone, on top of a shopping center in
Cologne, Germany.[27] Installed at the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2011, Paint Torch is a towering 53-foot-high (16 m) pop sculpture of a paintbrush, capped with bristles that are illuminated at night. The sculpture is installed at a daring 60-degree angle, as if in the act of painting.[28] In 2018, The Maze was included in 1968: Sparta Dreaming Athens at
Château de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art.[29]
In her 16-minute, 16mm film Manhattan Mouse Museum (2011), artist
Tacita Dean captured Oldenburg in his studio as he gently handles and dusts the small objects that line his bookshelves. The film is less about the artist's iconography than the embedded intellectual process which allowed him to transform everyday objects into remarkable sculptural forms.[36]
Personal life
Patty Mucha, who was married to Claes Oldenburg from 1960 to 1970, first met him after moving to New York City in 1957 to become an artist. When Oldenburg was painting portraits, Mucha became one of his nude models[37] before becoming his first wife. An Oldenburg drawing of Mucha titled Pat Reading in Bed, Lenox, 1959[38] is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was a collaborator in Oldenburg's happenings by coming up with ideas together, making the costumes together, and was also a performer in the piece, along with collaborating on happenings, she also as well, sewed his famous floor hamburger, ice cream, and cake. Mucha was lead singer in the band
The Druds who were a band of artists including Andy Warhol, LaMonte Young, Lucas Samaras, and Walter DeMaria pre-velvet underground.
Between 1969 and 1977, Oldenburg was in a relationship with the feminist artist and sculptor,
Hannah Wilke, who died in 1993.[39] They shared several studios and traveled together, and Wilke often photographed him.
Oldenburg and his second wife, Coosje van Bruggen, met in 1970 when Oldenburg's first major retrospective traveled to the
Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where van Bruggen was a curator.[40] The couple were married in 1977.[41]
In 1992, Oldenburg and van Bruggen acquired Château de la Borde, a small
Loire Valleychateau, whose music room gave them the idea of making a domestically sized collection.[40] Van Bruggen and Oldenburg renovated the house, decorating it with modernist pieces by among others
Le Corbusier,
Charles and Ray Eames, and
Alvar Aalto, Frank Gehry,
Eileen Gray.[42] Van Bruggen died on January 10, 2009, from the effects of breast cancer.[20]
Oldenburg's brother, art historian
Richard E. Oldenburg, was director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, between 1972 and 1993,[9] and later chairman of
Sotheby's America.[43]
On July 18, 2022, Oldenburg died at his home in
Manhattan from complications of a fall, aged 93.[44]
Art market
Oldenburg's sculpture Typewriter Eraser (1976), the third piece from an edition of three, was sold for $2.2 million at
Christie's New York in 2009.[45]
The Whitney Museum of American Art currently houses thirty of Oldenburg's works.[46]
Gallery
Flying Pins by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen,
Eindhoven, Netherlands
Axsom, Richard H., Printed Stuff: Prints, Poster, and Ephemera by Claes Oldenburg A Catalogue Raisonne 1958–1996 (Hudson Hills Press: 1997)
ISBN1-55595-123-6
Busch, Julia M., A Decade of Sculpture: the New Media in the 1960s (The Art Alliance Press: Philadelphia; Associated University Presses: London, 1974)
ISBN0-87982-007-1
Gianelli, Ida and Beccaria, Marcella (editors) Claes Oldenburg Coosje van Bruggen: Sculpture by the WayFundació Joan Miró 2007
Haskell, Barbara. Claes Oldenburg, Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Art Museum, 1971
Höchdorfer, Achim, Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties (Prestel: US, 2012)
ISBN3-7913-5205-9
Johnson, Ellen H. Claes Oldenburg, Penguin Books, (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England; Baltimore, Maryland, US; Ringwood, Victoria, Australia), 1971
Oldenburg, Claes. Log May 1974 – August 1976, Stuttgart: edition hansjorg mayer, 1976 (Two volume boxed set: "Photo Log" and "Press Log")
Oldenburg, Claes. Raw Notes: Documents and Scripts of the Performances: Stars, Moveyhouse, Massage, The Typewriter, with annotations by the author. (The Press of the
Nova Scotia College of Art and Design: Halifax, 2005)
ISBN0-919616-43-7
Thalacker, Donald W. "The Place of Art in the World of Architecture." Chelsea House Publishers, New York, 1980.
ISBN0-87754-098-5
Valentin, Eric, Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen. Le grotesque contre le sacré, Paris, collection Art et artistes,
Gallimard, 2009.
ISBN978-2-07-078627-5
Valentin, Eric, Claes Oldenburg et Coosje van Bruggen. La sculpture comme subversion de l'architecture (1981–1997), Dijon, collection Inflexion,
Les Presses du réel [
fr], 2012
ISBN978-2-84066-450-5
Citations
^James O. Young (2001). Art and Knowledge. New York: Routledge, p. 135.
^
ab"Claes Oldenburg obituary". The Guardian. July 18, 2022. Retrieved July 19, 2022. Oldenburg was married to Patty Mucha (nee Muchinski) from 1960 until their divorce in 1970, and to
Coosje van Bruggen from 1977 until her death. His brother Richard died in 2018. He is survived by his stepdaughter, Maartje, and stepson, Paulus.
^"Claes Oldenburg." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998; later: Gale. Retrieved via Biography in Context database, October 22, 2017.
^David McCracken, "The Art Fair That's Been In the Picture the Longest", Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1987, page 3