Claes Oldenburg, a brief history ...
Claes Oldenburg. Born Stockholm, 28th January 1929.
Claes Oldenburg was born the son of a Swedish diplomat. The family
lived in the United States and Norway before settling in Chicago in
1936. Oldenburg studied literature and art history at Yale
University, New Haven, from 1946 to 1950. He subsequently studied
art under Paul Weighardt at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1950
to 1954. During the first two years of art school, he also worked
as an apprentice reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago, and
afterward opened a studio, where he made magazine illustrations and
easel paintings. Oldenburg became an American citizen in December
1953.
In 1956, he moved to New York and met several artists making early
Performance work, including George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, George
Segal, and Robert Whitman. Oldenburg soon became a prominent figure
in Happenings and performance art during the late 1950s and early
1960s. In 1959, the Judson Gallery exhibited a series of
Oldenburg’s enigmatic images, ranging from monstrous human figures
to everyday objects, made from a mix of drawings, collages, and
papier-mâché. In 1961, he opened The Store in his studio, where he
recreated the environment of neighbourhood shops. He displayed
familiar objects made out of plaster, reflecting American society’s
celebration of consumption, and was soon heralded as a Pop artist
with the emergence of the movement in 1962.
Oldenburg realized his first outdoor public monument in 1967;
Placid Civic Monument took the form of a Conceptual
performance/action behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
with a crew of gravediggers digging a six-by-three-foot rectangular
hole in the ground. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he also proposed
colossal art projects for several cities, and by 1969, his first
such iconic work, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, was
installed at Yale University. Most of his large-scale projects were
made with the collaboration of Coosje van Bruggen, whom he married
in 1977. In the mid-1970s and again in the 1990s, Oldenburg and van
Bruggen collaborated with the architect Frank O. Gehry, breaking
the boundaries between architecture and sculpture. In 1991,
Oldenburg and van Bruggen executed a binocular-shaped
sculpture-building as part of Gehry’s Chiat/Day building in Los
Angeles.
Over the past three decades, Oldenburg’s works have been the
subject of numerous performances and exhibitions. In 1985, Il Corso
del Coltello was performed in Venice. It included the Knife Ship, a
giant Swiss Army knife equipped with oars; for the performance, the
ship was set afloat in front of the Arsenal in an attempt to
combine art, architecture, and theatre. The Knife Ship travelled to
museums throughout America and Europe from 1986 to 1988. Oldenburg
was honoured with a solo exhibition of his work at the Museum of
Modern Art, New York, in 1969, and with a retrospective organised
by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1995. Oldenburg lives in New
York.
Extract from Guggenheim museum website
(http://www.guggenheimcollection.org)
Oldenburg links:
http://www.oldenburgvanbruggen.com
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