Claes Oldenburg

NEW YORK — Influential Swedish-born sculptor Claes Oldenburg — whose giant works of everyday objects delight millions — has died in his New York City home ...

His proposals took the form of self-consciously absurd drawings. in the development of pop art". There's a whole collection of them, including several for New York."

NEW YORK — Pop artist Claes Oldenburg, who turned the mundane into the monumental through his outsized sculptures of a baseball bat, a clothespin and other ...

Many of Oldenburg’s later works were produced in collaboration with his second wife, Coosje van Bruggen, a Dutch-born art historian, artist and critic whom he married, in 1977. “It’s always a matter of interpretation, but I tend to look at all my works as being completely pure,” Oldenburg told the Chicago Tribune in 1977, shortly before “Batcolumn” was dedicated. In May 2009, a 1976 Oldenburg sculpture, “Typewriter Eraser,” sold for a record $2.2 million at an auction of post-war and contemporary art in New York.

Friends pay tribute to Swedish-American creator who played 'inextricable role' in spearheading the 1960s movement.

Oldenburg's career began in the 1950s in New York when abstract expressionism was at its peak. He was best known for his public art installations, which feature colossal, animated sculptures of everyday objects. “I was honoured to have this great friendship with one of the most radical artists of the 20th century.

The Swedish-American sculptor created larger-than-life works based on everyday objects such as a hamburger with a pickle on top of it.

In Chicago, the 96-foot "Batcolumn" of 1977 depicts a baseball bat. He followed up with "The Store" in 1961, a rented storefront that displayed small plaster sculptures of dresses, shoes and desserts. Oldenburg moved to New York in 1956 and soon rose to prominence with works such as "The Street" in 1960.

Oldenburg died at the age of 93. His work is displayed around the world. Advertisement. He created the Crusoe Umbrella, one of Des Moines' most ...

NEW YORK (AP) — Pop artist Claes Oldenburg, who turned the mundane into the monumental through his outsized sculptures of a baseball bat, a clothespin and ...

The final thing, though, was to have it against the sky, that’s what it was made for.” “Clothespin” resembles the ordinary household object, but its two halves face each other in the same way as Brancusi’s lovers. “It’s always a matter of interpretation, but I tend to look at all my works as being completely pure,” Oldenburg told the Chicago Tribune in 1977, shortly before “Batcolumn” was dedicated. One of his early large-scale works was “Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks,” which juxtaposed a large lipstick on tracks resembling those that propel Army tanks. He had considered making it red, but “color would have simply distracted from the linear effect. In May 2009, a 1976 Oldenburg sculpture, “Typewriter Eraser,” sold for a record $2.2 million at an auction of post-war and contemporary art in New York. Oldenburg eventually became a U.S. citizen. Many of Oldenburg’s later works were produced in collaboration with his second wife, Coosje van Bruggen, a Dutch-born art historian, artist and critic whom he married in 1977. “Batcolumn,” Oldenburg told the Tribune, “attempts to be as nondecorative as possible — straightforward, structural and direct. Oldenburg’s sculpture was also becoming known during this period, particularly ones in which objects such as a telephone or electric mixer were rendered in soft, pliable vinyl. That’s the fun.” Early in his career, he was a key developer of “soft sculpture” made out of vinyl — another way of transforming ordinary objects — and also helped invent the quintessential 1960s art event, the “Happening.”

“A four-story high, almost Gothic-appearing clothespin, which the artist proclaims as an updated version of 'The Kiss',” art critic Victoria Donohue wrote, “is ...

It is on a pedestal in the middle of the entrance to the underground section of Centre Square and the intersection of Philadelphia’s two subway lines. But you don’t even need all that explanation to like Clothespin. It’s a big clothespin in the center of downtown Philadelphia. What more do I need to tell you? The pins on the Clothespin look like a “76,” an Important Philadelphia Number, and if you walk behind it the clothespin lines up perfectly with the City Hall tower. And, yes, it references The Kiss, a sculpture by Constantin Brâncuși. I kinda see it. By 1982 the Inquirer called it “the champion of controversy” in a story by future Black Hawk Down writer Mark Bowden. “You think of all the great things that have happened in this city, and somebody who, for some ungodly reason, wants to put up something like that that makes us a laughingstock to the rest of the world,” said Art Gorman, a man who led the successful push for the city to display the Rocky statue. This is a heavily-developed area, and the clothespin creates a friendly intermediary in scale between the tall buildings and the tiny people scurrying below. “We need a symbol to show we’re not the snoozing mossbacks of the stereotype—to show that we’re what Macriarose would call ‘with-it’ or ‘today,’” Bob Lancaster wrote. That one’s OK. One of my favorites is Giant Three-Way Plug, which is behind the Art Museum here and also at Oberlin College. A Yale alumni mag story says the whole thing “was kept secret from the Yale authorities.” There was also supposed to also be a statue of a Philadelphia mummer, but that fell through, leaving Centre Square to purchase the Mummer-like Milord la Chamarre ( My Lord of the Fancy Vest) by Jean Dubuffet. The Fancy Vest Lord is still there, and so is Clothespin—a silly, simple giant sculpture by Claes Oldenburg, who died yesterday at 93. This was Oldenburg’s first major work, and just the sort of thing he’d become best known for.

Curators and gallerists share memories and insights on the late Claes Oldenburg, who died on July 18th at the age of 93.

We are honored to have hosted his and his wife Coosje van Bruggen’s Plantoir Blue this spring, a work of visionaries in the heart of their hometown. “Oldenburg had an ability to uncover the mystery and power of commonplace objects to create a body of work that is completely unique. “Today we mourn Claes Oldenburg, one of the all-time greats of the art world. “Claes Oldenburg, in his own words of 1961, was ‘for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all.’ The irreverence of his work cannot conceal its brilliance and profundity. “The loss of Claes Oldenburg, a great artist and good friend, is deeply saddening. Claes Oldenburg, who died on July 18th at the age of 93, wrote in 1961 what would become one of the most famous art manifestos: “I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum,” he began.

Works by the Swedish-born artist include an oversized rubber stamp in Cleveland, a clothespin in Philadelphia and a flashlight in Las Vegas.

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Martin Friedman draws on years of conversations with Claes Oldenburg to reflect on the artist's abiding preoccupation with the mouse.

Few of Oldenburg’s themes, of which there is such a rich profusion, can approximate the continuity and psychological depth of the mouse. A second and more durable version of the Mouse Museum was created for an exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, for a 1977 exhibition. The art world soon discovered The Store, and it became a place for discussions and performances. In drawings, the exterior looks a little like a loaf of bread, with a mouse-mask entrance. Both structures were exhibited in the first-floor main gallery of the MCA, with guards limiting the crowds entering. Like its predecessor, the second Mouse Museum displayed a collection of objects, but van Bruggen suggested the elimination of the exteri-or box, so that the mouse shape was now visible from the exterior. Koenig was the “director.” Oldenburg determined that the museum would contain familiar and unfamiliar objects, and inventoried the hundreds of items (both found objects and works made by the artist) selected for its “collections.” (Oldenburg and Koenig have long greeted each other as fellow officials of their hypothetical institution.) Oldenburg’s contribution was a structure he dubbed the Mouse Museum. I asked Claes about the mouse in Tom and Jerry. He responded, “That’s a later development. In “Six Themes,” the Geometric Mouse appeared in drawings, cloth masks, banners, cardboard models and painted aluminum and steel sculptures. Whatever was being served on the premises was attracting swarms of bees to our table, so we were obliged to retreat to Chateau Marmont, the hotel where Claes was staying, a few blocks west on the Strip, as that section of the boulevard is known. Its earliest appearance, as just a head, took the form of a large soft mask worn by participants in a 1965 Oldenburg performance titled Moveyhouse.

Some links to other sources from the past week (with a photo from this morning on Houston and Ludlow) ... • Remembering Hunter Reynolds, East Village artist ...

• History of Mechanics Alley on the LES (Ephemeral New York) • De Blasio scores campaign cash for the Congressional District 10 race from subjects of his ethics probes (The City) UPDATE: The former mayor drops out of the race ( Axios) • RIP Claes Oldenburg (CNN... more background on his LES history at Off the Grid)

Claes Oldenburg, whose large-scale public sculptures elevated the mundane and pulled art closer to everyday life, died on July 18 at age 93.

These early works—concerned with “the castoff and the crude, on the flotsam and jetsam of modern life,” per the New York Times’ Randy Kennedy—quickly found an audience. In the artist’s own words, “A catalog could be made of all such objects, which would read like a list of the deities or things on which our contemporary mythological thinking has been projected. These were some of the artist’s early “soft” sculptures, which were made of canvas or vinyl and filled with foam. A second version of “The Store” featured similar everyday items (with names like Floor Cake and Floor Burger) crafted from fabric. After graduation, he worked as a reporter in Chicago while studying at the Art Institute of Chicago at night. “The impulses that he first tapped are now everywhere in the field of art.

Even viewers who did not know the artist's name devoured his audacious sculptures of cheeseburgers, cherries and ice cream cones.

The art critic Barbara Rose, who wrote the catalog for his 1969 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, described him in her diaries as “looking like a bookkeeper going over his accounts – sober and economical.” I think I paid all of $50 for it, and knowing it was part of an open edition (instead of a limited one), made me like it more. Oldenburg’s champions point out that he was a brilliant draftsman and a deep thinker who did many clever drawings for sculptures that never materialized (and there is nothing that says “intellectual” like a noble failed project). In 1965, he sketched plans for an anti-war monument that consisted of a concrete behemoth inscribed with the names of the war dead — and designed to block traffic permanently at Broadway and Canal Street. But I don’t think these burnish his reputation. Oldenburg divorced Ms. Mucha in 1970, after a decade of marriage, and the truth is that his art lost some of its warmth and tenderness at that point. In the place of such philosophical conundrums, Oldenburg pursued a classically Pop agenda in that his sculptures are inseparable from their identity as consumer objects. Many of his strongest works are unimaginable without the participation of his first wife, Patty Mucha, an artist who performed in his Happenings and sewed his so-called soft sculptures. To sit on the floor pulling the bulky mass of fabric through the throttle of the portable sewing machine, was almost physically impossible at times.” The needle broke; she bled onto the sculptures. I say our studio because at this juncture all the construction was accomplished by sewing — a technique of which Claes had little knowledge.” Oldenburg’s now-historic installation, “The Store,” had a bluntly generic title that referred to the increasingly commercialized realm of galleries. Ditto for “Typewriter Eraser, Scale X” (1999), in the sculpture garden of the National Gallery of Art in Washington – has a man even ever handled such an object? They settled in Chicago, a city that has a much-lauded architectural history and calls itself, not unjustly, the birthplace of the skyscraper. In lieu of bronze sculptures of men on horseback, or long-forgotten patriots standing on a pedestal, hand over heart, orating through the ages, Oldenburg filled our civic spaces with nostalgia-soaked objects inflated to absurdist proportions.