Collection 1950s–1970s

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Claes Oldenburg. Giant Soft Fan. 1966-67 412

Vinyl filled with foam rubber, wood, metal, and plastic tubing, Fan, approximately 10' x 58 7/8" x 61 7/8" (305 x 149.5 x 157.1 cm), plus cord and plug 24' 3 1/4" (739.6 cm) long. The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection. © 2025 Claes Oldenburg

Artist, Claes Oldenburg:  My name is Claes Oldenburg, and I am, I hope, an artist. I came to New York because I thought that it was probably the only place one could begin a career as an artist. I went through all the things that you go through in New York.

Historian, Alex Fialho: If you've been to New York in the summer, you know how hot it can get. Oldenburg had a great idea.

Curator, Anne Umland: He thought of the fan first as a monumental sculpture placed on Staten Island, so blowing breeze up the bay. And later on, he thought about it as a replacement for the Statue of Liberty, guaranteeing, he said, workers on lower Manhattan a steady breeze.

And I think of the Statue of Liberty frozen in place, absolutely vertical, arm uplifted, situated on a platform, versus this schlumpy, wonderful sort of fan whose rotary blades drip down, and I instantly grasp what it is that Oldenburg did that was just so absolutely radical, unconventional, redefined our whole very notion of what sculpture is.

Claes Oldenburg: How I do my work—it grows out of the surroundings. My focus was on objects. And the one rule of my work is that it must not have any function. It must be completely form. I begin by removing the function of the thing, because its true function is to become an artwork