Claes Oldenburg | |
|---|---|
 Oldenburg in 2012 | |
| Born | (1929-01-28)January 28, 1929 Stockholm, Sweden |
| Died | July 18, 2022(2022-07-18) (aged 93) New York City, U.S. |
| Nationality |
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| Education | |
| Known for | Sculpture |
| Notable work | List of public art by Oldenburg and van Bruggen |
| Movement | |
| Spouses | |
| Partner | Hannah Wilke (1969–1977) |
| Children | 2[2] |
| Relatives | Richard Oldenburg (brother) |
| Awards |
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Claes Oldenburg (January 28, 1929 – July 18, 2022) was a Swedish-born American sculptor best known for hispublic art installations, typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work issoft 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.
Claes Oldenburg was born on January 28, 1929, inStockholm,[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 theLatin School of Chicago. He studied literature and art history atYale University[6] from 1946 to 1950, then returned to Chicago where he took classes atThe School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While further developing his craft, he worked as a reporter at theCity News Bureau of Chicago. He also opened his own studio and, in 1953, became anaturalized citizen of the United States. In 1956, he moved to New York, and for a time worked in the library of theCooper 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 the57th 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, includingJim Dine,Red Grooms, andAllan Kaprow, whosehappenings incorporated theatrical aspects and provided an alternative to theabstract 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 asSausage.)[9]
By 1960, Oldenburg had produced sculptures containing simply rendered figures, letters, and signs, inspired by theLower East Side neighborhood where he lived, made out of materials such as cardboard,burlap, and newspapers; in 1961, he shifted his method, creating sculptures fromchicken 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, atJudson Memorial Church onWashington Square.[11] During this time, artistRobert 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 thepop art movement and created many so-calledhappenings, 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 artistsLucas Samaras,Tom Wesselmann,Carolee Schneemann,Oyvind Fahlstrom andRichard Artschwager, art galleristAnnina Nosei, criticBarbara Rose, and screenwriterRudy Wurlitzer.[9] His first wife (1960–1970) Patty Mucha[13] (Patricia Muchinski),[14] who sewed many of his early soft sculptures, was 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, 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 theMartha 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 conceivedAUT OBO DYS, performed in the parking lot of theAmerican 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, fuzzyteddy bear looming over the grassy fields of New York'sCentral Park (1965)[15] andLipsticks in Piccadilly Circus, London (1966).[16] In 1967, New York city cultural adviserSam Green realized Oldenburg's first outdoor public monument;Placid Civic Monument took the form of a Conceptual performance/action behind theMetropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, with a crew ofgravediggers digging a 6-by-3-foot rectangular hole in the ground.[6] In 1969, Oldenberg contributed a drawing to theMoon Museum.Geometric Mouse-Scale A, Black 1/6, also from 1969, was selected to be part of theGovernor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection inAlbany, New York.[17]
Many of Oldenburg's large-scale sculptures of mundane objects elicited ridicule before being accepted. For example, the 1969Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, was removed from its original place inBeinecke 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 theMorse 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 fromOberlin College with a grant from theNational Endowment for the Arts.[19] His collaboration with Dutch/American writer and art historianCoosje van Bruggen dates from 1976. They were married in 1977, and continued to work collaboratively for 30 years, developing over 40 public pieces, which they called ‘large-scale projects’.[20] 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 reworkTrowel I, a 1971 sculpture of an oversize garden tool, for the grounds of theKröller-Müller Museum inOtterlo in the Netherlands.[21]
In 1988, the two created the iconicSpoonbridge and Cherry sculpture for theWalker Art Center inMinneapolis. It remains a staple of theMinneapolis Sculpture Garden as well as a classic image of the city.Typewriter Eraser, Scale X (1999) is in theNational Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden. Another well known construction by the duo is theFree Stamp indowntown Cleveland.[22]
In addition to freestanding projects, they occasionally contributed to architectural projects, among them, two Los Angeles projects in collaboration with architectFrank Gehry:Toppling Ladder With Spilling Paint, which was installed atLoyola Law School in 1986, and the building-mounted sculptureGiant Binoculars,[23] completed inVenice Beach in 1991.[9] The couple's collaboration with Gehry also involved a return to performance for Oldenburg when the trio presentedIl Corso del Coltello, inVenice, Italy, in 1985; other characters were portrayed byGermano Celant andPontus Hultén.[24] "Coltello" is the source ofKnife 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 presentedColtello Recalled: Reflections on a Performance at theJapanese American Cultural & Community Center and the exhibitionProps, 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 withThe South Bank Show which was broadcast onITV.[25][26]
The city ofMilan, Italy, commissioned the work known asNeedle, Thread and Knot (Italian: Ago, filo e nodo) which was installed in 2000 in thePiazzale Cadorna.[27] In 2001, Oldenburg and van Bruggen createdDropped Cone, a huge inverted ice cream cone, on top of a shopping center inCologne, Germany.[28] Installed at thePennsylvania 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.[29] In 2018,The Maze was included in1968: Sparta Dreaming Athens atChâteau de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art.[30]
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Oldenburg's first one-man show, in 1959 at the Judson Gallery in New York, had shown figurative drawings and papier-mâché sculptures.[16] He was honored with a solo exhibition of his work at theModerna Museet (organized by Pontus Hultén), in 1966; theMuseum of Modern Art, New York, in 1969; London'sTate Gallery in 1970 (chronicled in a 1970 twin-projection documentary byJames Scott calledThe Great Ice Cream Robbery[31]); and with a retrospective organized by Germano Celant at theSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum,[32] New York, in 1995 (travelling to theNational Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.;Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles;Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn; andHayward Gallery, London). In 2002, theWhitney Museum of American Art in New York held a retrospective of the drawings of Oldenburg and van Bruggen; the same year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York exhibited a selection of their sculptures on the roof of the museum.[6]
Oldenburg is represented by thePace Gallery in New York[33] andMargo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles.[34]
Oldenburg received honorary degrees from Oberlin College, Ohio, in 1970;Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, in 1979;Bard College, New York, in 1995; andRoyal College of Art, London, in 1996.[35]
Honors awarded to Oldenburg included:[35]
Oldenburg was a member of theAmerican Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters from 1975 on and theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1978.[35]
Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen together received honorary degrees from theCalifornia College of the Arts, San Francisco, California, in 1996;University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, England, in 1999;Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 2005; theCollege for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan, in 2005, and thePennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2011. Awards for their collaboration include the Distinction in Sculpture,SculptureCenter, New York (1994); Nathaniel S. Saltonstall Award,Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1996); Partners in Education Award, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2002); and Medal Award,School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2004).[35]
In her 16-minute, 16mm filmManhattan Mouse Museum (2011), artistTacita 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.[37]
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[38] before becoming his first wife. An Oldenburg drawing of Mucha titledPat Reading in Bed, Lenox, 1959[39] 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 bandThe 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.[40] 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 theStedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where van Bruggen was a curator.[41] The couple married in 1977.[42]
In 1992, Oldenburg and van Bruggen acquired Château de la Borde, a smallLoire Valleychateau, whose music room gave them the idea of making a domestically sized collection.[41] Van Bruggen and Oldenburg renovated the house, decorating it with modernist pieces by among othersLe Corbusier,Charles and Ray Eames, andAlvar Aalto, Frank Gehry,Eileen Gray.[43] Van Bruggen died on January 10, 2009, from the effects of breast cancer.[21]
Oldenburg's brother, art historianRichard E. Oldenburg, was director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, between 1972 and 1993,[9] and later chairman ofSotheby's America.[44]
On July 18, 2022, Oldenburg died at his home inManhattan from complications of a fall, aged 93.[45]
Oldenburg's sculptureTypewriter Eraser (1976), the third piece from an edition of three, was sold for $2.2 million atChristie's New York in 2009.[46]
The Whitney Museum of American Art currently houses thirty of Oldenburg's works.[47]
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Oldenburg was married to Patty Mucha (nee Muchinski) from 1960 until their divorce in 1970, and toCoosje van Bruggen from 1977 until her death. His brother Richard died in 2018. He is survived by his stepdaughter, Maartje, and stepson, Paulus.
