Claes Oldenburg
Pop Art, Conceptual Art
Born: 29 January 1929, Stockholm, Sweden
Nationality: American
Died: 18 July 2022, New York, USA

Oldenburg is a sculptor, known for his public installations featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Many of his works were created in collaboration with his wife, Coosie van Bruggen, who died in 2009. Oldenburg’s soggy hamburgers, giant three-way plugs, and enormous clothes pegs made him the king of Pop sculpture during the 1960s.

Oldenburg has been the king of Pop sculpture since the 1960s with his colossal clothespins, giant three-way plugs, and saggy hamburgers. He rented a storefront, The Store, in 1961 and stocked it with crudely painted, stuffed forms resembling diner foods, cheap clothing, and other product of mass-manufacturing that stunned an audience that had become used to the austere, non-representational forms of Abstract Expressionism. Oldenburg’s soft sculptures are the first Pop Art sculptural expressions. His focus remained on everyday objects presented on a magnified scale with his work growing in scale and ambition. Oldenburg reduces the viewer to a morsel that could be eaten along with a giant slice of cake.

Pop artists had imitated the flat languages of billboards, television, magazines, etc, in two-dimensional mediums, Oldenburg, however, brought Pop Art into the realms of sculpture with his three-dimensional paper maches, soft fabric forms, and plaster models, an important innovation at the time.

Oldenburg’s objects, no matter how insignificant in themselves, become entities like characters in a play due to their outsized scale and the soft form he chooses. this distances Olden burg from the detachment of Andy Warhol or Lichtenstein, making his sculptures portrait-like highlights of the absurdity of American culture with a gentler cynicism than his peers in Pop Art.

The concept of enlarging a small everyday object and placing it in a landscape was integral to Oldenburg’s monumental public art and was influenced by the Surrealists such as Magritte, Dali, and Ernst. The most Surreal of the Pop Artists Oldenburg’s sculptures are like Surrealist dreams made real. With his unconventional squishy and rearrangeable sculpture Oldenburg challenged the hard, vertical orientation of Abstract Expressionism. His work was a groundbreaker in the history of sculpture.

No matter how ordinary his subject, Oldenburg never saw them as just an object. His process of adjustment and fine-tuning reflects his unwavering interest in the impact of form and aligns him with the traditions of sculpture held by earlier masters from Michelangelo to Brancust.

Oldenburg was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1929. His father was a diplomat and the family settled in Chicago, USA in 1936. Oldenburg was educated at Yale and graduated in 1950. He took a job with the City News Bureau of Chicago and intermittently attended the Arts Institute of Chicago.

Oldenburg became and naturalized American citizen in 1953 and moved to New York to pursue his career in art. In New York, the artist was influenced by the environment of the Lower East Side where Fluxus, the Beats, and Pop Art groups converged on performance and gallery spaces at Judson Memorial Church. Oldenburg met and got to know the regulars such as Yoko Ono, Allan Kaprow, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, and Andy Warhol. The circle agreed that Abstract Expressionism was over, but what came next no one knew. Another resource was the library at Cooper Union where Oldenburg worked for several years and held his first solo exhibition in 1959.

In 1962 Oldenburg displayed “Floor Cake,” “Floor Cone,” and “Floor Burger,” three colossal sculptures, at the high-profile Green Gallery on 57th Street. These sculptures consisted of stuffed, painted, and sewn canvas. From this point on his work received critical acclaim, and for the next few years, his production of soft sculpture convenience foods, as well as everyday domestic objects, was prolific. Characterized by a fluid hand, Oldenburg’s works on paper remained an ongoing, important aspect of his work. Through the second half of the 1960s, he produced an extensive series of drawings of fantasy architecture. Also in the late 1960s he established a long-term association with the eminent art dealer Leo Castelli.

In 1967 to realize some of his larger projects Oldenburg participated in an art and technology program by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, leading to a residency at a branch of Walt Disney Enterprises facilitating the development of his cartoon mouse into which he incorporated a movie camera. This became Oldenburg’s personal symbol and inspired the painted steel mouse sculptures of diverse colours and sizes in 1972.

1976 was another breakthrough year for Oldenburg as he executed his first monumental outdoor sculpture, “Lipstick (Ascending” on Caterpillar Tracks,” and his first corporate commission “Clothespin.” From then on Oldenburg focused on large-scale public sculpture.

Oldenburg married the art historian, Coosie Van Broogen in 1977, and the couple collaborated on his colossal, polychrome outdoor sculptures from 1976 until her death in 2009. Their most popular works include “Spoonbridge and Cherry” (1985) and “Shuttlecock” (1994). Oldenburg died from a fall in his New York home at the age of 93

Resources:

Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology Paperback by Marla Prather, Germano Celant, Mark Rosenthal, Dieter Koepplin and illustrated by Claes Oldenburg