Claes Oldenburg came to New York City from his hometown of Chicago in 1956, when he was twenty-seven years old. Initially aiming to make his mark as a painter, by 1960 he had changed his mind: the way to upend the art of his time was through sculpture—sculpture of a sort never seen before. The results are some of the most audacious and provocative art objects of the twentieth century.
Oldenburg conceived his efforts in two successive campaigns: first The Street, which he made and presented in 1960, and then The Store, of 1961. The Street was an immersive installation depicting the artist‘s gritty Lower East Side neighborhood. Its materials—scavenged cardboard, newspaper, and black poster paint—mirrored the scene it portrayed. Oldenburg‘s portrait conveyed not only the squalor of the neighborhood, but also the mysterious allure of its “bums” and “chicks,” its signage, and even its manhole covers. Crudely rendered, as if by a child, Oldenburg‘s sculptures and drawings presented an abstracted version of reality, “a mixture of things as they are and things as they are imagined to be.”
In 1961 Oldenburg shifted his gaze from the street to the store. During this intensely productive period, he created an array of brightly colored objects depicting comestibles, clothing, and other everyday items. He displayed his sculptures in a rented storefront on East Second Street that he called the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company. The Store was open to the public Friday to Sunday, one o‘clock to six o‘clock; in the off-hours Oldenburg used the space as his studio. The handcrafted and painted art objects on sale were as unconventional as their setting: lumpy and unruly, they neither resembled the mass-produced items they purported to represent nor shared the recognizable look of fine art. “I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself,” said Oldenburg, “that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.”
Oldenburg‘s fascination with the stuff of everyday life is manifested in his passion for collecting nonprecious objects that attract his eye. In the 1970s he assembled a selection of hundreds of these items in a structure he entitled Mouse Museum, to which he soon added Ray Gun Wing. Together Mouse Museum and Ray Gun Wing present the artist's complex and sustained engagement with popular culture and its relationship to his work in all mediums.
Casein on papier-mâché over wire. 35 7/8 x 44 7/8 x 14 5/8" (90.9 x 113.8 x 36.9 cm). Gift of the artist. © 1959 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, Imaging and Visual Resources Department
Oldenburg first showed this work in a 1959 two-person exhibition, with Jim Dine, at the Judson Gallery. Constructed of torn newspaper pasted to wire armatures and loosely painted with a wash of casein, the sculptures in that exhibition marked a radical departure from the figurative paintings and drawings that had dominated Oldenburg's artistic production in the preceding years. Thematically, the ray gun epitomized this shift. “Ray Gun is both a form of deception (to everyone, including myself) and a form of play . . . i.e., only the comic is serious, only the offhand is effective,” Oldenburg wrote in his notebook. “Therefore Ray Gun is a series of contradictions, paradoxes. Ray Gun is ultimately the unknowable, pursued futilely through all its disguises.” An impossible invention of science fiction, the ray gun in Oldenburg's work can assume any number of forms and exist in a range of materials. This bulbous, oversized rendition was modeled on a toy gun that now resides in Ray Gun Wing.
Newspaper soaked in wheat paste over wire frame, painted with casein. 30 x 40 x 3" (76.2 x 101.6 x 7.6 cm). Glenstone. © 1959 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Tim Nighswander, courtesy of Glenstone
This relief pays homage to the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose unflinching portrayals of city life in novels such as Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment Plan, 1936) provided Oldenburg with an example of the experience of the street expressed directly through art. Seeking, in his own words, “a crudity in style to match the crudity of my surroundings in the poor area of NYC,” Oldenburg adopted a papier-mâché technique that he found in a children's art book, using tattered scraps of newspaper and wheat paste to make objects that he then splattered with black paint. Though legible through the paint drips, the fragments cannot be read conventionally as a single article or advertisement, just as Céline's name, spelled backwards, must be read from right to left.
Ink rolled on paper. Sheet: 13 x 9" (33 x 22.9 cm). 19 x 16" (48.3 x 40.6 cm). Collection Gail and Tony Ganz. © 1959 Claes Oldenburg.
Newspaper soaked in wheat paste over wire frame, painted with casein. 60 1/4 x 63 x 9 7/8" (153 x 160 x 25.1 cm). museum moderner kunst stfitung ludwig wien. On loan from the Austrian Ludwig Foundation since 1981. © 1959 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: © museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien/On loan from the Austrian Ludwig Foundation
Burlap and newspaper, painted with casein. 6' 3" x 46" x 7" (193 x 116.8 x 17.8 cm). Museum Ludwig Cologne / Peter und Irene Ludwig Stiftung. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Newspaper soaked in wheat paste over wire frame, painted with casein. 13 3/4" x 6' 9 1/8" x 7 7/8" (35 x 206 x 20 cm). museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien. Former Hahn Collection, Cologne acquired in 1978. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: © museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien/Former Hahn Collection, Cologne
Casein on cardboard. 8' 10 x 40 15/16" (269.2 x 104 cm). Museum Ludwig Cologne / Peter und Irene Ludwig Stiftung. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Casein on cardboard. 6' 1/16" x 44 1/2" (183 x 113 cm). Museum Ludwig Cologne / Peter und Irene Ludwig Stiftung. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Casein on cut-and-pasted cardboard. 54 3/4 x 23 7/8" (139.1 x 60.7 cm) (irreg). Gift of Agnes Gund. © 1961 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, Imaging and Visual Resources Department
Empire Sign—With M and I Deleted refers to the visual language of street graffiti. “It is quite right,” Oldenburg wrote while working on The Street, “to emphasize the vulgar if it has been neglected, if art has become too lyrical . . . by vulgar I mean proletarian, ordinary, tasteless, but also instinctive (life affirming).” Bustling New York City provided Oldenburg with the everyday subject matter that he sought. “Empire” may be a reference to the city's many buildings and businesses named in honor of New York, the so-called Empire State. Oldenburg often chose to leave out letters from his signs. Addressing this tendency in 1963, he commented, “Where I use writing, I should like to provoke a physical effect of enunciation.” Where letters are missing, “the writing loses its sign character.”
Cardboard and wood, painted with casein and spray enamel. 6' 3" x 50" (193 x 127 cm). Museum Ludwig Cologne / Peter und Irene Ludwig Stiftung. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
The layered cardboard scraps at the tip of this sculpture suggest a head in profile, but the bulk of the cardboard mass does not obviously refer to any one particular form. Oldenburg often experimented with ambiguity. In 1961 he wrote, “It is important to me that a work of art be constantly elusive, mean many different things to many different people. My work is always on its way between one point and another. What I care most about is its living possibilities.” In June 1960, Mug was included in New Media—New Forms in Painting and Sculpture at the Martha Jackson Gallery, the first in a two-part exhibition series that eschewed conventional painting and sculpture, instead favoring installations and assemblages made from junk materials.
Burlap, muslin, cardboard, wood, string, painted with casein. 10' x 38" x 15" (304.8 x 96.5 x 38.1 cm). Museum Ludwig Cologne / Peter und Irene Ludwig Stiftung. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
“What are my preferences in the real world: the city and the poor and the miserable.” Oldenburg made this declaration in typed notes pinned to a bulletin board in the Judson Gallery during his first presentation of The Street, in November 1959. He pursued these bleak interests in The Street's second iteration, at the Reuben Gallery the following May, in which this skeletal figure hung from the ceiling, representing a stock character encountered on the streets of the Lower East Side. She is crudely constructed from cardboard and burlap materials, which suggest poverty and degradation, an impression that Oldenburg reinforced by replacing her head with a crudely painted skull: an articulation of his idea that “the street is death,” as he wrote in his notebook at the time.
Cardboard and wood, painted with casein. 35 x 10 1/4" (88.9 x 26 cm). Museum Ludwig Cologne / Peter und Irene Ludwig Stiftung. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Corrugated cardboard, newsprint, wood, painted with casein. Height: 15' 5" (469.9 cm). Museum Ludwig Cologne / Peter und Irene Ludwig Stiftung. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Oil paint, rags, and wood. 30 x 40 x 3" (76.2 x 101.6 x 7.6 cm). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery Buffalo, New York. The Martha Jackson Collection at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1974. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Biff Henrich/IMG_INK
Ink, watercolor and cut-and-pasted newsprint on paper. 24 x 18 1/2" (61 x 47 cm). Courtesy The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg
Ink on paper. 11 15/16 x 17 9/16" (30.3 x 44.6 cm). Collection the artist. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Ellen Page Wilson, New York
Pastel, wax crayon, black typewriter ink, and graphite pencil on paper; Pastel and wax crayon on paper (verso). 8 3/8 x 10 3/4" (21.3 x 27.3 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Purchase, with funds from The Lauder Foundation, Evelyn and Leonard Lauder Fund for the Acquisition of Master Drawings and the Drawing Committee. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg
Crayon on paper. 14 x 16 11/16" (35.6 x 42.4 cm). The Menil Collection, Houston, gift of the artist. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Paul Hester
Spray oil wash on torn paper. 24 x 18" (61 x 45.7 cm). Collection the artist. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: D. James Dee, New York
“The city is a landscape well worth enjoying—damn necessary if you live in the city,” Oldenburg wrote in one of his early notebooks; “Dirt has depth and beauty.” In 1960 the artist translated his experience of living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan into an immersive sculptural environment called The Street. From cardboard, burlap, and newspapers he created sculptures inspired by the characters and vistas of his gritty neighborhood, where junk and trash lined the streets and derelict tenements were left to crumble. Letters, scraps of words, and crudely rendered figures recall graffiti scratched onto city walls, while the sculptures' torn and frayed forms speak to a fragmented field of vision, evoking the rush of life in the hardscrabble Lower East Side.
The Street constituted half of Ray Gun Show, a two-person exhibition, with Jim Dine, that opened at the Judson Gallery in Judson Memorial Church (near Washington Square Park) in January 1960. This ephemeral presentation also provided the backdrop for Snapshots from the City (1960), Oldenburg's first performance. Most of the objects on view in the exhibition were made for a second version of The Street, shown a few blocks away at the Reuben Gallery, at Fourth Avenue and Tenth Street, in May 1960.
Wood. 19 5/16 x 17 5/16 x 1 3/16" (49 x 44 x 3 cm). Centre Pompidou, Paris. Musée national d'art moderne / Centre de création industrielle. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: © Photo CNAC/MNAM Dist. RMN
Ink and crayon on paper. 29 1/2 x 47" (74.9 x 119.4 cm) (irreg). Purchase. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, Imaging and Visual Resources Department, Jonathan Muzikar
Oldenburg executed this drawing on wrinkled butcher paper found in the kitchen of the restaurant in Provincetown at which he worked in the summer of 1960. He exploited the material's flexibility, crinkling and ripping it, and completed the work by adding, in crayon, a few schematic lines that loosely evoke the American flag. As a motif, flags proliferated in Oldenburg's work, accommodating a great degree of formal and material experimentation. As the title indicates, Oldenburg intended this work to be folded and carried in a pocket.
Wood. 11 1/4 x 11 1/4 x 3 1/2" (28.6 x 28.6 x 8.9 cm). Collection Douglas Baxter. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg
Wood. 8 3/4 x 10 3/4 x 2 3/4" (22.2 x 27.3 x 7 cm). Collection the artist. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Dorothy Zeidman
Collage and wash, 15 3/4 x 19 7/8" (40 x 50.5 cm). Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Wood. 14 15/16 x 12 3/16 x 3 9/16" (38 x 31 x 9 cm). Centre Pompidou, Paris. Musée national d'art moderne / Centre de création industrielle. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY
Wood painted with bitumen. 14 3/8 x 8 7/16 x 6 1/8" (36.5 x 21.5 x 15.5 cm). Centre Pompidou, Paris. Musée national d'art moderne / Centre de création industrielle. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: © Photo CNAC/MNAM Dist. RMN
Heel, nails, wood, and rope, 7 3/4 x 9 1/2 x 1 1/2" (19.7 x 24.1 x 3.8 cm). Collection the artist. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Nathan Rabin Archive, Department of Image Collections, National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC
By simply nailing the heel of a shoe to a plank of wood, Oldenburg created a sculpture in the form of the American flag. Heel Flag works by visual association: the heel's placement and shape recalls the flag's starred canton, while the wood's grain evokes its striped design. Considering his interest in such relationships during his time in Provincetown, the artist wrote: “It has to do with unities that defy scale notions and other poetic unities and the excitement coming from the possibility that this (primitive thinking) means also ties in fact. A kind of delightful and childish belief which I take very seriously.”
Muslin, plaster, tempera, and wire. 24 x 30 x 3 1/2" (61 x 76.2 x 8.9 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of John and Mary Pappajohn, 2004. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Lee Ewing. Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
After a summer in Provincetown spent constructing “flags” from driftwood and other flotsam, Oldenburg returned to New York City, where he made U.S.A. Flag, his first painted plaster-soaked-canvas relief. U.S.A. Flag extinguishes the visual ambiguity characteristic of the Provincetown sculptures: Oldenburg painted the plaster mass with tempera in the unmistakable pattern of the American flag. This coalescence of painting and sculpture, mediums typically kept apart, is a hallmark of Oldenburg's Store works, begun later that autumn. “My struggle has been to return painting to the tangible object,” Oldenburg wrote in his notebook, “which is like returning the personality to touching and feeling the world around it, to offset the tendency to vagueness and abstraction. To remind people of practical activity, to suggest the sense and not to escape from the senses.”
Oldenburg spent the summer of 1960 in the historic seaside town of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he underwent what he would later call “an obliteration by non-city nature of my involvement with the city street.” Despite setting aside the theme of the street, Oldenburg retained his interest in making art from what he termed “anti-art materials,” swapping cardboard and burlap for driftwood salvaged from the shore. Drawing on the cultural significance of Provincetown as the site of the Pilgrims' first landing in North America (before they moved on to Plymouth), Oldenburg cobbled driftwood into constructions featuring forms of the American flag.
He described these assemblages in his notes as “souvenirs,” a label that hints at his particular interest in Provincetown as, he wrote, “a town so focused on the commercialization of patriotism and history.”
Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel. 69 5/8 x 34 1/4 x 8 3/4" (176.7 x 87 x 22.2 cm). Gift of G. David Thompson. © 1961 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, Imaging and Visual Resources Department
According to Oldenburg, this relief recalls his “vision of a pair of red teenage tights seen in the wind at the corner of Avenue A and 14th Street.” The work refers to this display of merchandise, but its jagged edges and the single number 9 also lend it the appearance of a torn advertisement. Oldenburg often tore images of commercial goods from magazines and newspapers as source material for his sculptures, which he described in 1961 as “rips out of reality,” fusing the printed advertisement with three-dimensional reality. Looking back, in 1970 the artist explained, “Vision at that time, for me, was assumed flatter, and what was seen, taken as a plane surface, like a film, mirror, or newspaper. Thus an advertisement or part of one, ripped from a newspaper, was taken to correspond to a glance at the plane of vision.”
Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel. 60 x 48 x 7 1/2" (152.4 x 121.9 x 19.1 cm). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The Panza Collection. © 1961 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Brian Forrest, Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel. 32 x 30 x 7" (81.3 x 76.2 x 17.8 cm). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The Panza Collection. © 1961 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studios
Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel. 50 3/8 x 49 3/16 x 6 1/8" (128 x 125 x 15.5 cm). Centre Pompidou, Paris. Musée national d'art moderne / Centre de création industrielle. © 1961 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Adam Rzepka. CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY
Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel. 41 3/4 x 29 1/2 x 11 3/4" (106 x 74.9 x 29.8 cm). Museum Ludwig Cologne / Ludwig donation. © 1961 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Köln
Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel. 44 1/2 x 40 3/4 x 6" (113 x 103.5 x 15.2 cm). Private collection. © 1961 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Gunter Lepkowski
Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel. 61 x 41 x 9" (154.9 x 104.1 x 22.9 cm). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Anonymous gift. © 1961 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Ben Blackwell
Muslin, plaster, chicken wire and enamel. 41 x 30 1/4 x 4" (104.1 x 76.8 x 10.2 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of Howard and Jean Lipman. © 1961 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Douglas M. Parker Studios
Cut-and-pasted paper and printed paper, watercolor, and crayon on paper. 20 x 26" (50.8 x 66.1 cm). Purchased with funds provided by Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis. © 1961 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, Imaging and Visual Resources Department, Thomas Griesel
Wax crayon and watercolor on paper. Sheet: 11 7/8 x 17 1/2" (30.2 x 44.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of The American Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc., Leonard A. Lauder, President. © 1961 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: © Whitney Museum of American Art, NY
Ink and watercolor on paper. 6 x 8 3/4" (15.2 x 22.2 cm). The Menil Collection, Houston, gift of the artist. © 1961 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Paul Hester
Crayon, pencil, ink, watercolor. 24 x 18 1/8" (61 x 46 cm). Private collection, New York. © 1961—62 Claes Oldenburg.
Burlap and muslin soaked in plaster, painted with enamel, metal bowls, and ceramic plates in glass-and-metal case. 20 3/4 x 30 1/8 x 14 3/4" (52.7 x 76.5 x 37.3 cm). The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection. © 1961—62 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, Imaging and Visual Resources Department, Kate Keller
“I work with very simple things that I come across while walking to work,” Oldenburg explained in 1964, “such as a certain kind of pastry . . . or certain kinds of displays or presentations and advertisements that I naturally come across as part of the urban landscape.” Pastry Case, I replicates just this sort of everyday sighting. The desserts displayed here are presented for the viewer's delectation on real dishes, heightening the tension between the tempting evocation of edible goods and their obvious artifice. In a 1969 interview, Oldenburg described this tension as a way of “frustrating expectations”: “The food, of course, can't really be eaten, so that it's an imaginary activity which emphasizes the fact that it is, after all, not real—that it's art, whatever that strange thing is of doing something only for itself rather than for function.”
Crayon and watercolor on paper. 10 x 7 1/2" (25.4 x 19.1 cm). Collection of the artist. © 1962 Claes Oldenburg.
Burlap soaked in plaster, painted with enamel. 7 x 14 3/4 x 8 5/8" (17.8 x 37.5 x 21.8 cm). Philip Johnson Fund. © 1962 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, Imaging and Visual Resources Department
Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel. 38 x 35 1/2 x 35 1/2" (96.5 x 90.2 x 90.2 cm). The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The Panza Collection. © 1962 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Brian Forrest, Courtesy of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Canvas filled with foam rubber and cardboard boxes, painted with acrylic paint. 52" x 7' x 7' (132.1 x 213.4 x 213.4 cm). Collection Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Purchase, 1967. © 1962 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Sean Weaver
Synthetic polymer paint and latex on canvas filled with foam rubber and cardboard boxes. 58 3/8" x 9' 6 1/4" x 58 3/8" (148.2 x 290.2 x 148.2 cm). Gift of Philip Johnson. © 1962 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, Imaging and Visual Resources Department, Jonathan Muzikar
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas filled with foam rubber and cardboard boxes. 53 3/4" x 11' 4" x 56" (136.5 x 345.4 x 142 cm). Gift of Philip Johnson. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, Imaging and Visual Resources Department, Kate Keller
Floor Cone is one of three large-scale soft sculptures that Oldenburg produced with his then wife, Patty Mucha, for an exhibition of The Store, at New York's Green Gallery. Simplified to cone and sphere, the sculpture is instantly identifiable an ice cream cone. Mucha recalls taking the work for a drive in a pickup truck along West Fifty-seventh Street, where the Green Gallery was located, and encountering a warm reception from children in passing cars, who “shouted out their approval.” However, the sculpture's relationship to its real-world referent is complicated by both its size and its material. Oldenburg exacerbated this deformation caused by gravity for his 1963 solo show at Los Angeles's Dwan Gallery, during which he propped Floor Cone upside down against a wall.
Canvas filled with shredded foam rubber, painted with liquitex and enamel. 41 3/4 x 42 1/2 x 4 1/4" (106 x 108 x 10.8 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection, Gift of Muriel Kallis Newman, 2006. © 1962 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY
Textiles, canvas, plaster, enamel, metal stand, neon tube, mirror, and fiberboard. 7' 1 13/16" x 63 3/4" x 50" (218 x 162 x 127 cm). Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest. © 1962 Claes Oldenburg.
Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel. 14 x 31 x 9" (35.6 x 78.7 x 22.9 cm). Collection of Samuel and Ronnie Heyman, Palm Beach, Florida. © 1963 Claes Oldenburg.
Vinyl, kapok, and wood painted with acrylic. 32 x 39 x 29" (81.3 x 99.1 x 73.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of The American Contemporary Art Foundation, Inc., Leonard A. Lauder, President. © 1963 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: David Heald, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
This is Oldenburg's first sculpture made of vinyl, a material that would play a central role in his future work. With its tiered, multipart construction and neat seams, the work differs from the oversized soft sculptures of food in Oldenburg's Store exhibition at the Green Gallery a few months earlier. In making Giant BLT, Oldenburg collaborated with his then wife Patty Mucha, who sewed the vinyl into shape, and his friend and fellow artist Richard Artschwager, who contributed the wooden bacon slices and the giant toothpick that pierces the sandwich.
“I'd like to get away from the notion of a work of art as something outside of experience, something that is located in museums, something that is terribly precious,” Oldenburg declared. In 1961 he presented a new body of work whose subject matter he had culled from the clothing stores, delis, and bric-a-brac shops that crowded the Lower East Side. The earliest Store sculptures, which debuted in spring 1961 at the Martha Jackson Gallery, at 32 East Sixty-Ninth Street, are wall-mounted reliefs depicting everyday items like shirts, dresses, cigarettes, sausages, and slices of pie. Oldenburg made them from armatures of chicken wire overlaid with plaster-soaked canvas, using enamel paint straight from the can to give them a bright color finish. At the gallery, the reliefs hung cheek by jowl, emulating displays in low-end markets.
In December 1961, Oldenburg opened The Store in the rented storefront at 107 East Second Street that served as his studio, which he called the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company. A fully elaborated manifestation of the project that he had begun months earlier, The Store conflated two disparate types of commerce: the sale of cheap merchandise and the sale of serious art. Oldenburg packed more than one hundred objects into the modestly sized room, setting previously exhibited reliefs alongside new, primarily freestanding sculptures. Everything was available for purchase, with prices starting at $21.79 up to $499.99. After The Store closed, on January 31, 1962, Oldenburg used the space to stage a series of performances collectively titled Ray Gun Theater.
Soft Sculpture
In September 1962, a solo exhibition of Oldenburg’s work opened at the Green Gallery, a commodious space at 15 West Fifty-Seventh Street in midtown Manhattan. Inspired by the luxury cars and grand pianos in midtown showrooms, Oldenburg had decided to make sculptures of an equivalent scale. Plaster was ill-suited to the task–too fragile and heavy–and so the artist, with the assistance of his then wife, Patty Mucha, a skilled seamstress, created sculptures of fabric. Working in the gallery, Oldenburg and Mucha made Floor Burger, Floor Cake, and Floor Cone, three oversized soft sculptures
“I like to work with very simple ideas,” Oldenburg has said. Despite their simplicity, Floor Burger, Floor Cake, and Floor Cone were groundbreaking artworks. Their soft, pliant, and colorful bodies challenged the convention that sculpture is rigid and austere, and their subject matter and colossal scale infused humor and whimsy into the often sober space of fine art. With this work Oldenburg proposed an alternate form of monumental sculpture, saluting subjects from contemporary American life. The following year, the artist began to make soft sculptures from colored vinyl. He exhibited a selection of these at the Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, in October 1963.
Wood and corrugated aluminum, Plexiglas display cases with 385 objects, sound. 103 9/16 x 377 15/16 x 401 9/16" (263 x 960 x 1020 cm). Museum moderner kunst stfitung ludwig wien. On loan from the Austrian Ludwig Foundation since 1981. © 1965 - 1977 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Courtesy of mumok
Wood, corrugated aluminum, and Plexigas display cases with 258 objects. 103 9/16 x 177 3/16 x 222 7/16" (263 x 450 x 565 cm). Museum moderner kunst stfitung ludwig wien On loan from the Austrian Ludwig Foundation since 1991. © 1969 - 1977 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Courtesy of mumok
Oldenburg has long been a collector of objects and images. His studio shelves contain an immense variety of items he has gathered during his daily travels, alongside experiments and prototypes for sculptures. Mouse Museum and Ray Gun Wing evolved from the artist's commitment to this practice of collection, storage, and display.
In 1965, soon after Oldenburg moved his studio to a loft on Fourteenth Street in Manhattan, he positioned various objects from his collection on a large storage unit and called it the “museum of popular art, n.y.c.” Although private, the display revealed the artist's egalitarian attitude: both artworks and knickknacks were valid candidates for inclusion in the “museum.” Seven years later, in 1972, Oldenburg formalized this project and made it public at the international art exhibition Documenta, in Kassel, Germany. Mouse Museum includes 385 objects selected from his collection of more than a thousand items, housed in a structure based on “Geometric Mouse,” a recurring motif in his drawings, prints, and sculptures. The Ray Gun Wing extension followed in 1977. Unlike Mouse Museum, which contains a miscellany of things, Ray Gun Wing features 258 “ray gun” specimens, including brightly colored toy guns as well as found objects with the right-angled form of a pistol. Its architectural structure echoes the shape of the objects contained within.
Mouse Museum and Ray Gun Wing propose an equivalence between collecting and creating while dissolving the distinction between everyday items and museum treasures. The accumulations contained within the structures offer the viewer the rare privilege of watching the artist see. They permit the visual equivalent of eavesdropping: it is as if Oldenburg were allowing us to stand behind him and look over his shoulder as he perceives the world.
Organized by Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Organized by Achim Hochdörfer, Curator, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien; and Ann Temkin, The Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator, and Paulina Pobocha, Assistant Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art.
Major support for the MoMA presentation is provided by The Dana Foundation, Donald B. Marron, The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art.
Support for the publication Claes Oldenburg: Writing on the Side 1956–1969 is provided by Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro.
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