Claes Oldenburg

American artist

• Born: January 28, 1929
• Birthplace: Stockholm, Sweden

Oldenburg was extremely influential in the mid-twentieth-century New York pop art scene. His art used everyday, found objects and other banal items to challenge the function of objects and their relationships with the individual. His work spanned many genres, notably assemblage and performance art.

Early Life

Claes Oldenburg (klahs OHL-dehn-burg) was born in Stockholm, Sweden. His father, a consulate general, moved the family to the United States in 1936. The young Oldenburg spent his youth in Chicago, Illinois. A bright, creative child surrounded by government figures because of his father’s job, Oldenburg constructed an entire miniature town he called Neuburg, for which he made maps, newspapers, magazines, and citizens.

From 1946 through 1950, Oldenburg attended Yale University, where he studied art and literature. He returned to Chicago upon graduation and worked as a newspaper reporter from 1950 through 1951. In 1952, he went back to school to study fine art at the Art Institute of Chicago until 1954. By the mid-1950s, Oldenburg began tiring of Chicago and its art scene and moved to New York City in hopes of finding inspiration and meeting like-minded artists.

In 1956, disliking New York’s Fifth Avenue storefronts and expensive uptown lifestyle, Oldenburg found a life for himself on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and immediately became enamored by the area’s street culture. This fascination would provide inspiration for his future works. Many of Oldenburg’s pieces during this time were assemblages, or “environments,” incorporating found objects, street graffiti, and commercial paint. Oldenburg also painted many abstract art pieces and developed friendships with artists such as Jim Dine, friendships that would prove to be life changing.

Oldenburg’s use of everyday objects in his art, and his fascination with consumerism at large, connected him with New York’s pop art movement. Pop artists Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol were major artists of the movement.

Life’s Work

Throughout the 1960s, avant-garde artists in New York participated in what were called Happenings, which were performance pieces that explored life’s trials and triumphs through audio and visual pieces. Oldenburg’s first entrance into Happenings, which debuted at the Judson Gallery in 1960, was an “environment” that re-created life scenes and featured everyday street items such as traffic signs, found objects, graffiti scribbles, and cardboard silhouettes of people and cars.

Oldenburg created a name for himself within the pop art and Happening scenes after debuting Store in a Happening in 1961 that occurred in an abandoned New York warehouse transformed into an art gallery. Store consisted of sculpture displays of women’s clothing and common household food items made out of plaster. The intimidating material and texture juxtaposed with the banal objects led to an ironic tension that gave life to the objects and allowed them to assume individual roles. It was through everyday items that Oldenburg questioned society, consumerism, and the individual’s relationship with both.

Store’s success led to Store 2 , which debuted in 1962 at New York’s Green Gallery. With Store 2, which would set the stage for his artistic future, Oldenburg traded the stiffness of plaster for the plush malleability of fabrics and created oversized food items that he arranged in the gallery space. The food objects, which were originally intended to act as props for a performance piece at a Happening, were sewn and stuffed at a gigantic scale, and they folded in on themselves and sagged in unintentional places. The objects quickly took on lives of their own. The fabric’s pliability and the out-of-scale proportions of the objects gave them personality and afforded them anthropomorphic qualities that would become a trademark of Oldenburg’s future work.

After Store 2, Oldenburg continued using life-sized and oversized props to create his environments at Happenings. By altering an object’s texture, scale, or both, Oldenburg forced viewers to question the object’s function and their relationship to it, frequently generating feelings of anxiety or amusement through its inherent absurdity. His Bedroom (1963) was no exception. Re-creating an ultramodern and chic hotel bedroom within a gallery space, Oldenburg incited frustration by employing tempting textures and sumptuous fabrics, while maximizing the room’s geometry to play with its perspective so that as the viewer approached the environment, the room’s furnishing appeared to be moving farther out of reach. The use of exact parallelograms and geometric figures that went into Oldenburg’s environments was a return to his newspaper work in which he had to align newspaper ads to fit perfectly within a page’s layout.

In 1964, Oldenburg had his first one-person show at the Ileana Sonnabend Gallery in Paris, and in 1969 he had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By the mid-1960s, Oldenburg began turning to conceptual art, creating a series of what he called “monuments,” which, like his environments, were to be made from ordinary objects magnified to enormous, almost threatening sizes, and which were to be placed in key political or cultural locations.

Oldenburg’s first monument was conceptualized, but never built, in 1965. The monument was to be a huge teddy bear positioned at the northernmost edge of Central Park in Harlem. The bear was to look longingly at the wealth, culture, and commerce of Manhattan while waving helpless, handless arms toward the city. The teddy bear idea was followed by political concept pieces, including a gigantic pair of scissors replacing the obelisk in Washington, DC, and a twenty-six-foot-tall lipstick replica placed along Caterpillar tank tracks as a protest against the Vietnam War.

In 1971, Oldenburg’s first monument was realized at Sonsbeek Park in Arnhem, the Netherlands. He planted, adjacent to a pond of water, a thirty-nine-foot-high garden trowel. The immense hand tool was positioned spade down, which allowed its gracefully bent handle to reach toward the sky and resemble the necks of swans in the nearby pond.

In 1977, Oldenburg married artist Coosje van Bruggen, with whom he had collaborated on large-format projects, including the Mouse Museum and Ray Gun Wing.

Throughout the following decades, Oldenberg continued to make numerous works of art, including many monuments. His monument Paint Torch, a giant paintbrush that lights up at night, was installed at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2011.

Significance

Oldenburg’s radical and inventive styles made him stand out among the pop artists of the 1960s and created a lasting place for him in art history. His ability to infuse irony and breathe life into inanimate objects simultaneously made viewers curious and uncomfortable.

Unlike other 1960s pop artists, Oldenburg was not interested in replicating glossy likenesses of everyday objects. Instead, he set out to challenge not only what the object could become, through experimenting with form, size, texture, and context, but also the public’s levels of acceptance and tolerance. His soft objects offered a textural sensuality to otherwise hard and sterile objects, while his monuments transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary by magnifying small objects such as garden tools or clothespins into gargantuan statues that hovered over cityscapes.

Oldenburg celebrated the banal, or the “excruciating banal,” as he called it, by reconstructing and redefining the ordinary and placing it in the spotlight. He changed a given object’s function and meaning by exploring and extracting its buried potentials. In redefining the ordinary, Oldenburg not only offered art lovers and future artists something to laugh over and discuss but also stripped the functionality of objects and a person’s relationship to those objects down to an abstract level, creating a deeper understanding of self and society.

Bibliography

Buskirk, Martha. Creative Enterprise: Contemporary Art between Museum and Marketplace. New York: Continuum, 2012. Print.

Celant, Germano. Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen. Milan: Skira, 1999. Print.

Gianelli, Ida, and Marcella Beccaria, eds. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen: Sculpture by the Way. Milan: Skira, 2007. Print.

Hochdörfer, Achim, and Barbara Schröder. Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties. New York: Prestel, 2012. Print.

Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. Rev. ed. New York: Random, 2013. Print.

Lee, Janie C. Claes Oldenburg Drawings in the Whitney Museum of American Art. New York: Whitney Museum, 2002. Print.

Madoff, Steven H. Pop Art: A Critical History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Print.

Oldenburg, Claes. Claes Oldenburg: Early Work. New York: Zwirner, 2005. Print.

Oldenburg, Claes, and Germano Celant. Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995. Print.

Walther, Ingo F., ed. Art of the Twentieth Century. New York: Taschen, 2000. Print.