Claes Oldenburg

Biography

In December 1961 a shop window on Manhattan’s Lower East Side held plaster hamburgers, cakes and articles of clothing covered in enamel. This was “The Store”: Oldenburg rented the premises for a month and sold his own sculptures in the form of consumer goods. A month earlier the project had been shown at the Martha Jackson Gallery.

He was born on 28 January 1929 in Stockholm (Malmö is also given). His father, Gösta Oldenburg, was a Swedish diplomat. In 1936 he was appointed consul general in Chicago, and the boy grew up there, attending the Latin School of Chicago. From 1946 to 1950 he studied literature and art history at Yale University, then returned to Chicago, took classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked part-time as a reporter at the City News Bureau. He opened his own studio and in 1953 became a United States citizen. His older brother Richard Oldenburg directed the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1972 to 1993.

In 1956 Oldenburg moved to New York, worked for a time in the library of the Cooper Union Museum and read art history on his own. There he met Jim Dine, Red Grooms and Allan Kaprow, whose happenings offered an alternative to Abstract Expressionism. His first show with three-dimensional works took place in May 1959 at the Judson Gallery, in the church on Washington Square. By 1960 he was making figures, letters and signs from cardboard, burlap and newspaper, inspired by the neighbourhood where he lived; in 1961 he moved to chicken wire covered with plaster-soaked canvas and painted with enamel. Soft sculpture had appeared as early as 1957: a stocking stuffed with newspaper, now called “Sausage”.

In the 1960s he staged happenings in his own “Ray Gun Theater”. Lucas Samaras, Tom Wesselmann, Carolee Schneemann, Öyvind Fahlström and Richard Artschwager took part. His first wife, Patty Mucha, sewed many of the early soft pieces and was a constant performer in these events. In 1963 he left for Los Angeles because, as he put it, it was the most opposite place to New York he could think of. There, in December 1963, he staged “AUT OBO DYS” in the parking lot of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

From 1965 he drew projects for imaginary monuments: a teddy bear looming over Central Park, lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus, London (1966). In 1967 New York City’s cultural adviser Sam Green carried out his first realised monument: behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gravediggers dug a rectangular hole in the ground. Two years later he made “Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks” for Beinecke Plaza at Yale. The sculpture was in time removed from its original site and circulated to other campuses; it now stands in the courtyard of Morse College. The critic Ellen Johnson saw in it an attack on the sterility of the classicist building behind it; the artist himself wrote of levity set against solemnity, colour against colourlessness, metal against stone.

From the early 1970s he turned almost entirely to public commissions. The first was “Three-Way Plug” for Oberlin College, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. From 1976 he worked with the Dutch-American writer and art historian Coosje van Bruggen, and they married in 1977. Together they made more than forty large-scale projects, and from 1981 Oldenburg signed all his work with both names. Among them are “Batcolumn” in Chicago, a 30-metre steel baseball bat (1977); “Spoonbridge and Cherry” for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1988); “Needle, Thread and Knot” in Piazzale Cadorna in Milan (2000); and a huge inverted ice cream cone on a shopping centre in Cologne (2001). With the architect Frank Gehry they made “Toppling Ladder with Spilling Paint” (1986) and “Giant Binoculars” (1991) in Los Angeles. In 1985 in Venice Oldenburg returned to performance: with Gehry and van Bruggen he presented “Il Corso del Coltello”.

His solo exhibitions included the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (1966), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1969), the Tate Gallery (1970) and a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1995). In 2002 the Whitney Museum of American Art showed drawings by Oldenburg and van Bruggen, and a selection of their sculptures was exhibited on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He received the Wolf Prize in Arts (1989), the Rolf Schock Prize (1995) and the National Medal of Arts (2000).

Van Bruggen died in 2009. Oldenburg lived another thirteen years and died at his home in Manhattan on 18 July 2022.