Claes oldenburg nationality

Swedish-born American sculptor (–)

Claes Oldenburg (January 28, – July 18, ) was a Swedish-born American sculptor best known for his public art installations, typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects.

Oldenburg biography pop art artists list By Adam Hencz. American sculptor Claes Oldenburg was best known for his large-scale replicas of everyday objects. He believed that his colossal public art projects were more than mere celebrations of the mundane, as he is frequently associated with the Pop Art movement of the s. Like Andy Warhol and other Pop artists, Oldenburg found inspiration in ordinary consumer objects, charging them with vigorous human connotations. On July 18th, , Pace gallery in New York, which has long represented Oldenburg along with Paula Cooper Gallery, announced that the artist passed away that day at age

Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, who died in ; they had been married for 32 years. Oldenburg lived and worked in New York City.

Early life and education

Claes Oldenburg was born on January 28, , in Stockholm,^[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 was appointed consul general of Sweden to Chicago where Oldenburg grew up, attending the Latin School of Chicago.

He studied literature and art history at Yale University^[6] from to , then returned to Chicago where he took classes at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While further developing his craft, he worked as a reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He also opened his own studio and, in , became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

In , he moved to New York, and for a time worked in the library of the Cooper 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]

Work

Main article: List of public art by Oldenburg and van Bruggen

Oldenburg's first recorded sales of artworks were^[when?] at the 57th Street Art Fair in Chicago, where he sold 5 items for a total price of $^[8] He moved back to New York City in There he met a number of artists, including Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Allan Kaprow, whose happenings incorporated theatrical aspects and provided an alternative to the abstract expressionism that had come to dominate much of the art scene.

Oldenburg began toying with the idea of soft sculpture in , 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 as Sausage.)^[9]

By , Oldenburg had produced sculptures containing simply rendered figures, letters, and signs, inspired by the Lower East Side neighborhood where he lived, made out of materials such as cardboard, burlap, and newspapers; in , he shifted his method, creating sculptures from chicken 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 , was at the Judson Gallery, at Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square.^[11] During this time, artist Robert Beauchamp described Oldenburg as "brilliant", due to the reaction that the pop artist brought to a "dull" abstract expressionist period.^[12]

In the s, Oldenburg became associated with the pop art movement and created many so-called happenings, 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 artists Lucas Samaras, Tom Wesselmann, Carolee Schneemann, Oyvind Fahlstrom and Richard Artschwager, art gallerist Annina Nosei, critic Barbara Rose, and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer.^[9] His first wife (–) 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 , he rented a store on Manhattan's Lower East Side to house "The Store", a month-long installation he had first presented at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, stocked with sculhly in the form of consumer goods.^[9]

Oldenburg moved to Los Angeles in "because it was the most opposite thing to New York [he] could think of".^[9] That same year, he conceived AUT OBO DYS, performed in the parking lot of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in December In , 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, fuzzy teddy bear looming over the grassy fields of New York's Central Park ()^[15] and Lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus, London ().^[16] In , New York city cultural adviser Sam Green realized Oldenburg's first outdoor public monument; Placid Civic Monument took the form of a Conceptual performance/action behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, with a crew of gravediggers digging a 6-byfoot rectangular hole in the ground.^[6] In , Oldenberg contributed a drawing to the Moon Museum.

Geometric Mouse-Scale A, Black 1/6, also from , was selected to be part of the Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection in Albany, New York.^[17]

Many of Oldenburg's large-scale sculptures of mundane objects elicited ridicule before being accepted.

For example, the Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, was removed from its original place in Beinecke 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 the Morse College courtyard.

From the early s on, Oldenburg concentrated almost exclusively on public commissions.^[16] His first public work, Three-Way Plug came on commission from Oberlin College with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.^[19] His collaboration with Dutch/American writer and art historian Coosje van Bruggen dates from They were married in , 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 on with both his own name and van Bruggen's.^[9] Their first collaboration came when Oldenburg was commissioned to rework Trowel I, a sculpture of an oversize garden tool, for the grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo in the Netherlands.^[21]

In , the two created the iconic Spoonbridge and Cherry sculpture for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

It remains a staple of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden as well as a classic image of the city. Typewriter Eraser, Scale X () is in the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden. Another well known construction by the duo is the Free Stamp in downtown Cleveland.^[22]

In addition to freestanding projects, they occasionally contributed to architectural projects, among them, two Los Angeles projects in collaboration with architect Frank Gehry: Toppling Ladder With Spilling Paint, which was installed at Loyola Law School in , and the building-mounted sculpture Giant Binoculars,^[23] completed in Venice Beach in ^[9] The couple's collaboration with Gehry also involved a return to performance for Oldenburg when the trio presented Il Corso del Coltello, in Venice, Italy, in ; other characters were portrayed by Germano Celant and Pontus Hultén.^[24] "Coltello" is the source of Knife Ship, a large-scale sculpture that served as the central prop; it was later seen in Los Angeles in when Oldenburg, van Bruggen and Gehry presented Coltello Recalled: Reflections on a Performance at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center and the exhibition Props, Costumes and Designs for the Performance "Il Corso del Coltello" at Margo Leavin Gallery.^[9] He collaborated with English director Gerald Fox in to make a documentary about himself in association with The South Bank Show which was broadcast on ITV.^[25][26]

The city of Milan, Italy, commissioned the work known as Needle, Thread and Knot (Italian: Ago, filo e nodo) which was installed in in the Piazzale Cadorna.^[27] In , Oldenburg and van Bruggen created Dropped Cone, a huge inverted ice cream cone, on top of a shopping center in Cologne, Germany.^[28] Installed at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in , Paint Torch is a towering foot-high (16&#;m) pop sculpture of a paintbrush, capped with bristles that are illuminated at night.

Oldenburg biography pop art artists With his saggy hamburgers, colossal clothespins and giant three-way plugs, Claes Oldenburg has been the reigning king of Pop sculpture since the early s, back when New York was still truly gritty. In he rented a storefront, called it The Store , and stocked it with stuffed, crudely-painted forms resembling diner food, cheap clothing, and other mass-manufactured items that stupefied an audience accustomed to the austere, non-representational forms in Abstract Expressionist sculpture. These so-called "soft-sculptures" are now hailed as the first sculptural expressions in Pop art. While his work has continued to grow in scale and ambition, his focus has remained steadfast: everyday items are presented on a magnified scale that reverses the traditional relationship between viewer and object. Oldenburg shrinks the spectator into a bite-sized morsel that might be devoured along with a giant piece of cake, or crushed by an enormous ice pack.

The sculpture is installed at a daring degree angle, as if in the act of painting.^[29] In , The Maze was included in Sparta Dreaming Athens at Château de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art.^[30]

Exhibitions

Oldenburg's first one-man show, in 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 the Moderna Museet (organized by Pontus Hultén), in ; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in ; London's Tate Gallery in (chronicled in a twin-projection documentary by James Scott called The Great Ice Cream Robbery^[31]); and with a retrospective organized by Germano Celant at the Solomon R.

Guggenheim Museum,^[32] New York, in (travelling to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn; and Hayward Gallery, London). In , the Whitney 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 the Pace Gallery in New York^[33] and Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles.^[34]

Recognition

In , Oldenburg won the Wolf Prize in Arts.

In , he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.^[35] Oldenburg received honorary degrees from Oberlin College, Ohio, in ; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois, in ; Bard College, New York, in ; and Royal College of Art, London, in , as well as the following awards: Brandeis University Sculpture Award, ; Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture, ; Art Institute of Chicago, First Prize Sculpture Award, 72nd American Exhibition, ; Medal, American Institute of Architects, ; Wilhelm-Lehmbruck Prize for Sculpture, Duisburg, Germany, ; Brandeis University Creative Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement, The Jack I.

and Lillian Poses Medal for Sculpture, ; Rolf Schock Foundation Prize, Stockholm, Sweden, He was a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters from on and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from ^[36]

Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen together received honorary degrees from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, California, in ; University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, England, in ; Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia, in ; the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan, in , and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Awards for their collaboration include the Distinction in Sculpture, SculptureCenter, New York (); Nathaniel S.

Saltonstall Award, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (); Partners in Education Award, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (); and Medal Award, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston ().^[36]

In her minute, 16mm film Manhattan Mouse Museum (), artist Tacita 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]

Personal life

Patty Mucha, who was married to Claes Oldenburg from to , first met him after moving to New York City in 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 titled Pat Reading in Bed, Lenox, ^[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 band The Druds who were a band of artists including Andy Warhol, LaMonte Young, Lucas Samaras, and Walter DeMaria pre-velvet underground.

Between and , Oldenburg was in a relationship with the feminist artist and sculptor, Hannah Wilke, who died in ^[40] They shared several studios and traveled together, and Wilke often photographed him.

Oldenburg and his second wife, Coosje van Bruggen, met in when Oldenburg's first major retrospective traveled to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where van Bruggen was a curator.^[41] The couple married in ^[42]

In , Oldenburg and van Bruggen acquired Château de la Borde, a small Loire 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 others Le Corbusier, Charles and Ray Eames, and Alvar Aalto, Frank Gehry, Eileen Gray.^[43] Van Bruggen died on January 10, , from the effects of breast cancer.^[21]

Oldenburg's brother, art historian Richard E.

Oldenburg, was director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, between and ,^[9] and later chairman of Sotheby's America.^[44]

On July 18, , Oldenburg died at his home in Manhattan from complications of a fall, aged ^[45]

Art market

Oldenburg's sculpture Typewriter Eraser (), the third piece from an edition of three, was sold for $&#;million at Christie's New York in ^[46]

The Whitney Museum of American Art currently houses thirty of Oldenburg's works.^[47]

Gallery

See also

General and cited references

Citations

External links