OLDENBURG, Claes Thure

(b. 28 January 1929 in Stockholm, Sweden), pop sculptor and painter who endowed his soft sculpture and monuments with a humor and fantasy unique in the pop style of the 1960s.

The older of two sons of Swedish diplomat Goesta Oldenburg and concert singer Sigrid Elisabeth (Lindforss) Oldenburg, Oldenburg was brought to the United States as an infant, moved to Oslo in 1933, then settled in Chicago in 1936. In his late teens and early twenties he frequented the seedy environment along Rush Street's burlesque row. He studied literature and art at Yale University, earning a B.A. in 1950. In 1953 he became a naturalized U.S. citizen. In June 1956 he moved to Manhattan, settling at 330 East 4th Street, which served as his studio until June 1961. On 13 April 1960 he married Patricia Joan Muschinski; they divorced in 1970.

Through his friendship with Allan Kaprow and Red Grooms, Oldenburg cofounded a gallery in the Judson Memorial Church, where in May–June 1959 he held his first public one-man show; it featured fragile sculptures made by dripping newspaper into wheat paste and setting this on a chicken wire armature. In early 1960 he staged six group performances, or "happenings," in the Judson Gallery. In December 1961 and January 1962 Oldenburg set up his Store, which he had incorporated as a business called the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company, in two versions at the Judson Gallery and then the Reuben Gallery. He put up for sale brightly painted three-dimensional plaster sculptures in lumpy shapes of food and apparel items, the kinds that he saw about him in delicatessens and bargain basements. A plate of meat was priced at $399.98 and a man's sock at $199.95.

In the summer of 1962 the show was expanded at the Green Gallery on 57th Street to include gargantuan soft sculptures made of sewn pieces of canvas that were painted and stuffed with foam rubber. These included a five-by seven-foot hamburger and a ten-foot ice cream cone. In a sense, these evoked the human condition more poignantly than the hard sculpture of a person because, like flesh, they yielded to the prodding of a finger. Beginning in 1963 Oldenburg made soft white vinyl works, "ghost" versions of appliances, such as fans and typewriters, and that year prepared an entire environment, his Bedroom Ensemble. In March–April 1965 came the first drawings of his monuments, works to be set in the outside environment rather than in a gallery or other enclosed space. In 1965 Oldenburg moved from the Chelsea Hotel, where he had been staying, to a new studio loft at 404 East 14th Street.

Oldenburg's soft sculptures are richly allusive. The sexual component is strongly present in the Bedroom Ensemble and in works associated with it, where the light switches are like giant nipples and the plugs and wall sockets evoke sexual intercourse. But the allusions, which are often set forth in elaborate notes and drawings, can be multiple and many-faceted. Of his Giant Soft Drum Set (1967) he observed, among other points, that it would not have developed without his experience as artist in residence at Aspen; he compared the piece to architecture, "with the wooden sticks being the poles and the metal cymbals the roofing." Noting that his first and only musical instrument was a set of drums, he described the drum set as "the image of the human body of both sexes, a bisexual object." The drooping Giant Soft Fan (1966–1967) is more than a flaccid inept apparatus (as are all his apparatuses—telephones, toilets, etc.). He finds in this object connections we would never suspect. He pointed out, for instance, that the blades represent a banana with its skin peeled back, that the motion of the blades recalls that of windmill flails, and that the word fan means Satan in Swedish.

Some of the monuments were exercises of fantasy, never meant to be erected. These included a Good Humor bar with a bite taken out, for a tall building on New York's Park Avenue (1965); moving giant pool balls that would shoot across Central Park at random times, crushing the unfortunate pedestrian who happened to be in the way (1967); and huge toilet float balls to be floated down the Thames River (1967). Actually set up on the campus of Yale University in 1969 was the aluminum tube with steel body of his Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, joined images of warfare and female consumerism, with the lipstick resembling a red-tipped warhead.

In 1961 Oldenburg set forth a manifesto consisting of proclamations beginning with the phrase "I am for an art that.…" The world described was chaotic, dangerous, unpredictable, and exciting, one filled with things in constant motion that were messy and noisy and ridiculous. Examples include: "I am for an art that comes out of a chimney like black hair and scatters in the sky"; "I am for an art that spills out of an old man's purse when he is bounced off a passing fender"; "I am for the art of red and white gasoline pumps and blinking biscuit signs"; "I am for an art of old plaster and new enamel." Major accomplishments after the 1960s included the forty-five-foot-high Cor-Ten and stainless steel clothespin installed opposite Philadelphia's City Hall on 25 June 1976, the bicentennial year. In the spring of the Clothespin (Oldenburg always preferred the old-fashioned wooden clothespins to hold together canvas sections) one can see the number "76." The clothespin form can be perceived as that of two lovers; a sexually aggressive advancing female, her legs spread; a bird of flight; or a missile.

Oldenburg married Coosje Van Bruggen on 22 July 1977. Together they set up the Batcolumn (a 100-foot-tall column in the shape of a baseball bat) beside the U.S. Social Security Administration Building in Chicago in 1977, and a Spoonbridge and Cherry (a metal bridge in the form of a spoon with a cherry resting in it) in the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (1985–1988).

Oldenburg kept the wittiness of pop art but replaced its typical hardness and distancing and occasional social commentary with objects that seemed more accessible because they projected a variety of anthropomorphic qualities.

Barbara Rose, Claes Oldenburg (1970), includes many drawings and statements by the artist. Other works about Oldenburg are Barbara Haskell, Claes Oldenburg: Object Into Monument (1971); Guggenheim Museum and National Gallery of Art, Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology (1995), with essays by Germano Celant, Dieter Koepplin, and Mark Rosenthal and excellent full-page color photos from the early work, some with audience observing and participating; and Richard H. Axsom and David Platzker, Printed Stuff: Prints, Posters, and Ephemera by Claes Oldenburg: A Catalogue Raisonné 1958–1996 (1997).

Abraham A. Davidson