Background

Claes Thure Oldenburg was born on January 28, 1929 in Stockholm, Sweden. He is the son of Gosta and Sigrid Elisabeth (Lindforss) Oldenburg. He had a brother.

Education

Claes Oldenburg attended the Latin School of Chicago. He studied at Yale University from 1946 to 1950, before working at the City News Bureau in Chicago and attending the Art Institute of Chicago. He has also received honorary degrees from Oberlin College (1970); Art Institute of Chicago (1979); Bard College, New York (1995); and Royal College of Art, London (1996).

Career

In 1956 Oldenburg moved to New York City and became an active member of city's thriving young artistic community. For a time he worked as an assistant in the Cooper Union Museum's library, taking advantage of the opportunity to teach himself more about the history of art. His early years in New York were shaped by his contact with other artists struggling to move beyond the confines of Abstract Expressionism, including Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Robert Whitman, Lucas Samaras, George Segal, and Jim Dine.

Oldenburg's first New York exhibition took place in late 1958, when a selection of his drawings was included in a group show at Red Grooms' City Gallery. In 1959 he had his first public one-man show in New York — an exhibit of drawings and sculpture at the Judson Gallery. In 1962 Oldenburg's work was included in the "New Realists" Exhibition, which defined the Pop Art Movement. That show at the Sidney Janis Gallery largely defined the group of artists with which Oldenburg has since been associated. Other major exhibitions of Oldenburg's work included a 1964 one-man show at the Sidney Janis Gallery and a 1969 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Oldenburg's style changed and developed over the years. He worked in a variety of modes, including drawing, painting, film, soft sculpture, and large scale sculpture in steel. After 1959 he was influenced by the theater. His involvement in "happenings" in the early 1960s resulted from his interest in both participatory art and Freudian free association.

In the mid-1960s Oldenburg also began making projects for giant monuments. An exhibition of these proposals was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1967. Most of these ideas (like a giant teddy bear for Central Park North) were pure fantasy, but the artist viewed some as feasible. Among those executed were the controversial Lipstick on Caterpillar Tracks (1969), which created an uproar when first erected at Yale University; Giant Icebag (1969 - 1970), which was motorized and inflates and deflates; and Flashlight (1981), a 38-foot steel monument on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

In 1977 Oldenburg began to collaborate on commissions with his wife Coosje, and from 1981 her signature also appeared on their work. They worked with architect Frank Gehry on the Main Street Project (1975 – 1984) in Venice, California, and Camp Good Times (1984 – 1985) in the Santa Monica Mountains. With van Bruggen, Oldenburg created such large-scale sculptures as Spoonbridge and Cherry (1985 – 1988) for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, as well as a soft sculpture of an oversized shuttlecock specially for a 1995 retrospective of his work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Achievements

• Claes Oldenburg created works of art which were a wonderful blend of reality and fantasy. Oldenburg's artistic success was due in part to his irreverent humor and incisive social commentary. He took objects from the everyday world such as typewriters, lipstick, a flashlight, lifted them out of their usual context, and forced viewers to reassess their preconceptions about the objects.
  
  His retrospectives include at the Pasadena Art Museum (1971-1972), the Walker Art Center (1975), the Museum Ludwig (1979) and the National Gallery of Art in partnership with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1995).
  
  His 'Clothespin Ten Foot' sold at Christie's New York 'Post-War & Contemporary Evening Sale' in 2015 for $3,637,000.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Bottle of Notes & Some Voyages

    (Claes Oldenburg describes his working methods, looks at e...)

    1988
  • Claes Oldenburg: Large Scale Projects, 1977 to 1980

    (A Chronicle by Coosje van Bruggen and Claes Oldenburg, ba...)

    1980
  • Claes Oldenburg: Multiples in Retrospect 1964-1990 1991
  • Large-Scale Projects

• installation

  • Soft Bathtub (Model) — Ghost Version

    1966

  • Soft Drainpipe - Blue (Cool) Version

    1967

• sculptura

  • Plug

    1970

• sculpture

  • "Empire" ("Papa") Ray Gun

    1959

  • Pastry Case

    1961

  • Floor Cake

    1962

  • Floor Cone

    1962

  • Pastry Case, I

    1962

  • Two Cheeseburgers, with Everything (Dual Hamburgers)

    1962

  • Floor Burger (Giant Hamburger)

    1962

  • Knäckebröd

    1966

  • Giant Soft Fan

    1967

  • Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks

    1969

  • Geometric Mouse, Scale A

    1975

  • Clothespin

    1976

  • Spoonbridge and Cherry (collaboration with van Bruggen)

    1988

  • Profiterole

    1990

  • The Bottle of Notes

    1993

  • Typewriter Eraser, Scale X (collaboration with van Bruggen)

    1999

  • Dropped Cone (collaboration with van Bruggen)

    2001

  • Cupid's Span (collaboration with van Bruggen)

    2002

  • Spring (collaboration with van Bruggen)

    2006

  • ”Free” Stamp at Cleveland City Hall (collaboration with van Bruggen)

Views

Philosophically, Oldenburg saw himself as a realist, not as an abstract artist. He felt art must relate to the realities of everyday life. Yet he took objects from the real world and placed them out of context, making them soft when they should be hard, large when they should be small.

Quotations: "Because my work is naturally non-meaningful, the meaning found in it will remain doubtful and inconsistent — which is the way it should be. All that I care about is that, like any startling piece of nature, it should be capable of stimulating meaning."

Membership

• 

  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

  1978

• 

  American Academy of Arts and Letters , United States

  1975

Connections

On April 13, 1960 Claes Oldenburg married Patricia Joan Muschinski. They divorced in 1970. On July 22, 1977 he married Coosje van Bruggen. He have a daughter.

Father:

Gosta Oldenburg

Mother:

Sigrid Elisabeth (Lindforss) Oldenburg

Spouse:

Coosje van Bruggen

Spouse:

Patricia Joan Muschinski

Brother:

Richard Erik Oldenburg

Daughter:

Maartje Oldenburg

colleague:

Tom Wesselmann

colleague:

Richard Artschwager

References

• A Decade of Sculpture: The New Media in the 1960s
• Claes Oldenburg (Penguin new art 4)
• Claes Oldenburg: Drawings and Prints
• Printed Stuff: Prints, Poster, and Ephemera by Claes Oldenburg A Catalogue Raisonne 1958-1996