the ordinary must not be dull: claes oldenburg`s soft sculptures

THE ORDINARY MUST NOT BE DULL:
CLAES OLDENBURG’S SOFT SCULPTURES
Tamara H. Schenkenberg
I have found myself the last two years or so (1963) in a specific perverse
relation to my surroundings … I have combined my unworldly fantasy in a
shock wedding to banal aspects of everyday existence … so completely …
the thing is likely to burst either way, as it has arrived at a point where the
cohabitation is no longer possible … either into banality or the other way
into poetry …1
—Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) is widely regarded as one of the most
important and influential artists of his generation. Visually provocative,
formally innovative, and consistently unpredictable in almost any medium,
Oldenburg has defied the expectations of sculpture over the last five
decades. In 1962, the artist debuted his “soft sculptures” after previous
explorations in both painting and performance had activated, for him,
the latent poetry that exists at the boundary between art and life. By using
pliable materials such as canvas and vinyl, which invariably collapse into
limp, deflated forms, Oldenburg translated the medium of sculpture from
solid to soft. He further upended conventions by choosing everyday items
as the subject of his art and distorting their appearance through exaggerations in material, form, and scale. The Ordinary Must Not Be Dull: Claes
Oldenburg’s Soft Sculptures considers the artist’s decades-long development
of this now iconic body of work, which sought to transform the ordinary
into the extraordinary by appealing to the senses and amplifying the power
of the mundane.
Oldenburg’s early work often featured portraits and figure
studies, but after moving from Chicago to New York in 1956, he gradually
sought new means of expression. In the wake of Allan Kaprow’s seminal
18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959), Oldenburg—along with other artists
who positioned themselves as the new avant-garde, such as Carolee
Schneemann, Jim Dine, and Red Grooms—started to organize a new genre
of non-narrative, interactive performances that were often partially
scripted, but left room for randomness and chance.2 These “Happenings”
gave Oldenburg an expanded notion of art, particularly as it related
to his study of the human form, which he now began to decouple from the
2
stasis of the picture plane. He also felt a sense of urgency and responsibility
to the surroundings, experiences, and times of New York in the 1960s.
As the decade dominated by abstract expressionism was coming to a close,
Oldenburg wanted his art to provide “an antithesis to the attitude of
abstract painters who tried to remove art from reality,” and instead frame
his work as “an attempt to put art and reality together.”3
This newfound outlook resulted in two major works that straddled
the prosaic and the poetic. In 1960 at the Judson Gallery, he debuted
The Street, an immersive environment that combined painting, sculpture,
and installation into a series of ramshackle, gritty urban scenes made
from newspapers, cardboard, burlap, and other detritus that Oldenburg
had salvaged. The dilapidated environment served as a backdrop for
Oldenburg’s first Happening, Snapshots from the City (1960), for which he
and Patty Mucha (who would become his first wife)4 dressed up in tatters
and thrashed about convulsively to a soundtrack of jarring urban noises—
culminating with Oldenburg’s demise by a cardboard gun.5
In the winter of 1961–62, Oldenburg followed up The Street with
The Store, another immersive environment. He launched it out of the
storefront rented on 107 East Second Street that also served as his studio,
which he called the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company. During a twomonth period, Oldenburg stocked the storefront with objects cast in plaster
and painted in enamel that resembled mass-produced goods—such as
shirts, jackets, cigarettes, pastries, underwear, and a plate of meat—and
he took on the role of both proprietor and store clerk during open hours,
offering his “commodities” for sale at prices ranging from $21.79 to $899.95.6
The Store not only straddled the disciplines of painting and sculpture, but
also introduced an iconographic repertoire to which the artist would return
throughout his career: mundane, commonplace, and often distinctly
American objects recast as artwork. The commercial subject matter and
setting of The Store indicated Oldenburg’s interest in the effects of
consumerism, capitalism, and the popular culture of his day, which affiliated
him with the emerging pop art movement. However, he maintained that
this focus was incidental and circumstantial: “I may have things to say
about [the] US and many other matters, but in my art I am concerned with
perception of reality and composition. Which is the only way that art
can really be useful—by setting an example of how to use the senses.”7
While Baked Potato II (1963), on view in this exhibition, was not
sold during the commercial phase of The Store, it was created in the studio
that Oldenburg operated at that East Second Street location (plate 1).8
3
THE ORDINARY MUST NOT BE DULL
Claes Oldenburg in The Store, 107 E. 2nd St., New York, NY,
December 1, 1961–January 31, 1962. Photograph by Robert McElroy
Like other works in this period, the artist created this sculpture by soaking
canvas in wet plaster, shaping it over a wire frame, and painting it in
readymade, glossy enamel that he purchased from a hardware store and
applied directly from the can. Oldenburg also peeled back the potato’s
outer skin to reveal what appear to be three melting pats of butter nestled
inside a soft, cushioned interior. Baked Potato II’s creased and gaping
surfaces recall the raw emotion and crude textures that Oldenburg admired
in the work of Jean Dubuffet (1901–85).9 Similarly, the energetic rivulets
and skeins of paint call to mind the abstract, large-scale paintings of the
period, particular those by Jackson Pollock. Oldenburg thus upturned
action painting’s association with physicality and masculinity by pairing
its visual markers with a common tuber—albeit presented at an inflated
scale. Here, Oldenburg extends the flat surface qualities of painting
into three-dimensional form, thereby affirming Baked Potato II’s autonomy
as a work of art. At the same time, the sculpture is suffused with an aura
of banality, even abjectness—both through its reference to a lowly subject,
and in the disheveled appearance of its surface, which calls to mind
soiled, wrinkled bed linens, among other obliquely prurient associations.
By placing his work between abstraction and figuration, between painting
4
Claes Oldenburg’s Soft Sculptures
and sculpture, and between the high and the low, Oldenburg identified
paradox as a fertile ground for his art.
Combining a rigid exterior with a padded inner “flesh,” Baked
Potato II marks a turning point in Oldenburg’s practice as he started to
more fully explore soft materials in addition to working with plaster.10 This
development was partially a result of Oldenburg’s first uptown show at
the Green Gallery, a space run by Richard (Dick) Bellamy. As with The Street
and The Store, Oldenburg’s approach to Bellamy’s invitation was
formulated as a response to an environment, which the artist developed
in conversation with Mucha, to whom he was now married. “As galleries
go,” she recalled, “the floor space was not particularly large, but the fact
that it was one big long rectangular room made it a major challenge for
C.O. How to fill that space? Wouldn’t even his larger plaster pieces be lost
in that area? Some sleepless nights here. Enter his anxiety about technique
once again.”11 Oldenburg found a renewed inspiration in storefronts—
especially luxury car showrooms. According to Mucha, Oldenburg’s focus
was not on the function of the displayed items, but rather on their scale.
“What he saw was: form as size which filled up a space. How to make
sculptures that large? This was the issue at hand.”12 With plaster deemed
too heavy, they began to discuss alternate methods for creating work
at a scale that would hold the space. Mucha’s sewing skills had already
resulted in costumes and props for various Happenings, but now her
Singer machine was put in the service of making sculptures.
Oldenburg and Mucha’s joint efforts yielded a type of sculpture
that was neither fashioned from traditional materials such as wood,
stone, marble, clay, or metal, nor executed with conventional techniques
of carving, modeling, or casting. Instead, the fabrics sewn by Mucha
and painted by Oldenburg at the Green Gallery were given volume through
stuffing. The three resulting works—in the forms of an oversized
hamburger, ice cream cone, and cake slice—became the precursors to a
groundbreaking body of work that would become known as soft sculptures.
The medium that for centuries was associated with heroic stature and
edifying aspirations had gone soft.
Shortly after the opening of the Green Gallery show in 1962 (which
also featured Sports, a raucous Happening performed by Oldenburg,
Mucha, and Lucas Samaras), Oldenburg and Mucha moved to Los Angeles,
which became a catalyst for the artist’s intensified engagement with
soft sculptures. “I could see that the emphasis was on the home,” he later
explained: “Everything in Los Angeles relates to furnishing your own
5
THE ORDINARY MUST NOT BE DULL
Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, and Patty Mucha performing in the
Happening “Sports” at the Green Gallery, New York, October 5, 1962.
Photograph by Robert McElroy
house.”13 The items that one encountered within these private spaces—
particularly the bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and living room—became
a source for new works, which Oldenburg announced in the Bedroom
Ensemble (1963), an installation that reimagined the front room of the
Sidney Janis Gallery as a fully furnished bedroom, or rather, as a sculpture
in a form of a bedroom. This preoccupation with the domestic realm
also coincided with the artist’s discovery of vinyl, a synthetic material that
had only recently been introduced to the market. Its pliability became
integral to the production and development of soft sculptures, while its
availability in a range of colors and textures offset the need to paint
the surfaces.
French Fries and Ketchup (1963)—one of Oldenburg’s first works
in vinyl—alludes to the tactile, material experiences that occur within
domestic settings (plate 2). The slick surface of the glossy red blob (in the
form of poured ketchup) suggests a range of industrial materials such as
the plastic and metal prevalent in housewares and home furnishings of the
time. Similarly, the speckled texture of the yellow “fries” calls to mind
familiar upholstery fabrics found in living room furniture. Much like Green
Beans (1964), a sculpture that Oldenburg rendered in a glistening,
6
Claes Oldenburg’s Soft Sculptures
Patty Mucha with French Fries and Ketchup, 1963. Photograph by John Thompson
7
THE ORDINARY MUST NOT BE DULL
iridescent green vinyl (plate 3), French Fries and Ketchup represents
the expressive potential of this material for the artist, as well as the fluid
associations afforded by its textures.14
Both of these oversized sculptures are composed of parts that
can be configured and arranged to present subtle variations and effects.
Operating in a mode that aims to move beyond a fixed perception of
objects, Oldenburg’s work frequently prompts viewers to a kind of free
association through which forms can shift and alter. With French Fries
and Ketchup and Green Beans, for example, the stacked compositions of
soft rectangular shapes can be perceived as the food purported by their
titles, but also simultaneously seen as a pile of logs, a heap of bones and
blood, collapsed architectural columns, and so on. An avid and prolific
writer, Oldenburg would often make notes that documented his ongoing
preoccupation with the metamorphic potential of form, such as “pizza
equals toilet equals plug equals iron equals switch,”15 and “beans equal
film lenses equal cigarettes.”16 This range of visual analogues, and the
attention they drew to movement and mutability, became imperative to
Oldenburg. Take, for example, Sculpture in the Form of a Fried Egg
(1966–71), on view in this exhibition (plate 10). After using it as a prop in
Massage—a Happening organized in Stockholm in 1966—Oldenburg
continued to explore the sculpture’s adaptability in other contexts, stating
that one could fly it like a flag or sleep on it like a mattress.17 “It is important
to me that a work of art be constantly elusive, mean many different
things to many different people,” he has explained: “My work is always
on its way between one point and another. What I care most about is
its living possibilities.”18
Although vinyl opened up new options for Oldenburg, it also
presented challenges. The material was not as forgiving as canvas, and
would reveal even the smallest missteps in the sewing. Together with
Mucha, Oldenburg devised a method of working in vinyl that consisted
of multiple stages, which mitigated any margin of error in the final work.
The first step was to translate his drawing into a three-dimensional
cardboard cutout, from which Mucha would then create a pattern in white
canvas. This intermediary sculpture was stuffed and used by Oldenburg
and Mucha to make corrections, which would eventually be incorporated
into the finished vinyl work. The version made in heavy, white canvas
reminded Oldenburg of a specter, prompting him to name such preliminary
works as the “ghost” versions—also works of art in their own right.
Throughout the 1960s, Mucha was not only Oldenburg’s partner
8
Claes Oldenburg’s Soft Sculptures
Claes Oldenburg and Patty Mucha making Giant Soft Swedish Light
Switches, 1966. Photograph by Hans Hammarskiöld
in life and integral to his Happenings, but she also played a vital role in
the development and construction of the soft sculptures. She recalls
detailed conversations that went into the construction and presentation of
each object: “My knowledge of those kinds of technical problems helped
in the fluidity of getting the work done. Plus, my question to Claes ‘How is
it going to hang?’ would often initiate a necessary discussion to solving
that all-important query.”19 The contours and parameters of the collaboration, however, raise an often-complicated critical issue. Due to the
gender-normative attitudes still prevalent in the early 1960s, women—
and especially those who were artists—remained frequently marginalized,
and it is perhaps not surprising that Oldenburg and Mucha assumed
traditional gender roles: he as the creator, and she in the supporting position. They even referred to these sculptures as their symbolic “children.”20
Despite her contributions, Mucha never clamored for credit,
and she appears content with having been a part of such a creative, prolific
period and thankful for even the smallest acknowledgments of her
contribution: “A poster announcing the opening of Claes’ [Green Gallery]
exhibition showed a biplane in thick, black, crayony line; my name, PAT,
9
THE ORDINARY MUST NOT BE DULL
was scrawled upside down. This was a lovely tribute to the amount of work
I had done for this show.”21
After returning from Los Angeles to New York in 1964, Oldenburg
opened another exhibition featuring items from the home, which
included two versions of Soft Light Switches—the “ghost” in canvas (plate
4) and the fully realized vinyl (plate 5). Both are intended to be hung
on a wall rather than presented in the round, almost like a sculpture in relief.
Unlike traditional sculptures, however, these works do not soar vertically
but are instead pulled down by the force of gravity, which Oldenburg
described as his “favorite form creator.”22 This downward sag signals
one of Oldenburg’s innovative approaches to sculpture: the harnessing of
soft materials toward the mutability of form. The vinyl shell, which is
both stuffed and slack, imbues the light switches with a fleshy, drooping
quality that conjures images of a rounded belly, buttocks, or breasts.
Both sculptures are infused with a sense of the human body, which
Oldenburg tinges with sensual, erotic implications. The implied appeal to
titillation provokes a tactile response, which introduces Oldenburg’s desire
“to translate the eye into the fingers.”23 This notion is fundamental to his
work: “At the bottom of everything I have done, the most radical effects,”
he has said, “is the desire to touch and be touched. Each thing is an
instrument of sensuous communication.”24
The anthropomorphic undercurrent of Soft Light Switches is not
uncommon in Oldenburg’s larger body of work, including Autobodys (1963).
Emerging from the artist’s fascination with the Los Angeles freeway
culture, this drive-in Happening introduced cars and other vehicles as
surrogates for the people who operated them.25 Two years later,
Oldenburg’s engagement with the automobile resulted in a discrete series
of soft sculptures known as Airflow, which he debuted at the Sidney
Janis gallery in 1965. The central motif of this series is the 1939 Chrysler
Airflow, which despite its innovative, streamlined design did not meet
with commercial success. Oldenburg fondly remembered the car from his
childhood, however, and quite by happenstance, an artist-friend he met
later in life turned out to be the son of the Airflow’s designer, Carl Breer, and
offered him access to his father’s research and design files from the period.26
The first example of Airflow came in response to a commission
for the ARTnews cover of February 1966. A drawing that Oldenburg made
for the magazine shows the car divided into segments—depicting its
front, back, top, bottom, and sides—which could be folded, cut out, and
assembled into a rectangular box (plate 6). Oldenburg translated this
10
Claes Oldenburg’s Soft Sculptures
fragmentation of the car on the cover into a three-dimensional approach
to the vehicle. Although the Airflow series features only a few sculptures that
represent the car in its entirety—including the impaled and tattered
version on display in this exhibition (plate 7)—the series is mainly comprised
of the car’s constituent parts, such as the radiator, fan, engine, and tires
(plate 8). Oldenburg executed these “parts” in canvas, imprinted them with
patterns using corrugated cardboard, and painted them to suggest
a sense of volume—an absurdist gesture, perhaps, given that the sculptures
already occupy a very real physical space. (Although it was not part of
the Airflow series, the contemporaneous Soft Key [1965] was produced
using similar materials and methods [plate 9].) Art historian Barbara Rose
has compared Oldenburg to an anatomist who dissects the car’s “internal
organs” in order to subvert its destructive power, thereby making the
vehicle more human and awkward, and concludes that for Oldenburg: “the
car is both double and enemy, with equal potential for pleasure and
destruction.”27 In working on the Airflow series, Oldenburg also introduced
a graduated spectrum of sizes—here, ranging from the smallest (Scale 1)
to the largest (Scale 5)—that he would continue to apply to other subjects.
This allowed Oldenburg to explore objects beyond the amorphous
category of “giant,” which is a term he had previously used in his titles
to describe size (e.g., Giant BLT, Giant Toothpaste Tube, etc.).
Toward the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the next decade,
scale played an increasingly complex role in Oldenburg’s oeuvre. During
this period, the three-way electrical plug became a recurrent subject,
which he rendered in both soft and hard formats and in American, Swedish,
and English varieties. As with the metaphorical or associative potential
of other quotidian objects, Oldenburg was drawn to the architectural quality
of the plug, whose form called to mind cathedrals, crematoriums, and
castles.28 This iconography first appeared in a drawing in 1965, which
depicts a plug bobbing in water. The largest version—Giant Three-Way
Plug, Scale A, executed in three editions using Cor-Ten steel and bronze
prongs—was installed at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1970, followed by a
second iteration installed outside the City Art Museum (now Saint Louis
Art Museum) in 1971. That same year, Oldenburg made an indoor version
of the three-way plug in the same scale, subtitled Prototype in Blue (1971),
which is on view in this exhibition (plate 11). At twelve feet tall, this iteration of the plug in blue Naugahyde
assumes a monumental scale that suits traditional notions of sculpture. At
the same time, Oldenburg undercuts our expectations by distancing the
11
THE ORDINARY MUST NOT BE DULL
item from its everyday existence through startling distortions in form
and color. By suspending the sculpture from the ceiling, Oldenburg
exaggerates its size and anatomy, as well as the gravitational pull, which
intensifies the effect of its humanoid lumps, folds, and crevices.
Furthermore, the sculpture can assume various attitudes depending
on whether it is installed fully aloft, or lowered to a sagging position with
the “prongs” upon the ground. These exaggerations—the object’s
ungainly, swollen size; undisciplined, limp form; and garish, unnatural
color—may at first appear playful and even humorous, yet they also
possess a subversive potential to trigger disquieting associations
of excess, anomaly, and pathology. The eye searching for meaning may
perceive the sculpture as simultaneously vulnerable and menacing,
animated and fatigued.
Oldenburg found a way to accelerate and exacerbate this
vacillation of form through an introduction of mechanical movement
featured in Ice Bag–Scale B (1971), which he also produced as a multiple
(plate 12). When powered, the sculpture’s inflatable yellow fabric swells
and contracts in an unhurried, twisting, up-and-down motion while also
emitting a sound—as if to suggest a breathing body or, perhaps, a potent
force on the verge of being spent.29
Dual or doubled realities often assume an equal footing in
Oldenburg’s work, such as in Clothespin–4 Ft.–(Soft Version) (1975),
which demonstrates the artist’s keen sense for deploying the banal
to generate conflicting messages that revel in ambivalence, irreverence,
and absurdist comedy (plate 13). Drawing upon Dadaist and surrealist
approaches, Oldenburg demonstrates his own brand of wry wit and humor
by hanging a sculpture in the form of an inverted clothespin from a
hanger by actual clothespins. The joke relies on doubling the humble
domestic object both as a functional item and as art. Here, Oldenburg’s
ongoing interest in the interplay and tension between the spheres of art
and life is laid bare. Clothespin also prefigures Oldenburg’s first large-scale
public project installed in 1976 in Philadelphia, which further magnified
and reimagined the potential of this image.30
Soft materials and forms continued to manifest themselves in
Oldenburg’s later work, including Soft Folding Chair–Red (1987), created
for an installation by Oldenburg and his second wife, Coosje van Bruggen
(1942–2009), which reimagined the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s
Haus Esters as a dilapidated and vandalized environment (plate 14).31
By the early 1970s, however, the development of large-scale public
12
Claes Oldenburg’s Soft Sculptures
projects became the focus of Oldenburg’s endeavors. Although this phase
coincided with the end of his marriage to Mucha (the couple divorced
in 1970), it alone does not account for the gradual shift away from soft
sculpture. Rather, it represents the scaling up of his work toward the
monumental, and a growing interest in exploring the liminal zone between
sculpture, architecture, and the public sphere. Mucha’s sewing in these
years was replaced by the industrial production methods and materials
Oldenburg developed with a metal fabricator, Lippincott. By 1976,
Oldenburg had entered into a formal creative partnership with van Bruggen,
and together they co-created more than twenty large-scale public
projects worldwide.32
The yielding, malleable body of work that Oldenburg executed
in canvas and vinyl during the 1960s and early 1970s charted a new course
for sculpture. Not only did it introduce the element of softness into an
otherwise rigid medium, but it also identified a new urgency and vitality
at the critical juncture between art and life. In contrast to the previous
generation of artists who abandoned figuration to focus on color, space,
and line, Oldenburg pursued the opposite direction as a means to create
meaning. In lieu of abstraction, he co-opted the stuff of everyday life and
pushed it to its extreme. Oldenburg’s proclamation that “the ordinary
must not be dull,” but must be made “excruciatingly, excruciatingly banal”33
makes this imperative clear. By drawing on and exaggerating the
material, form, and scale of ordinary functional objects, Oldenburg’s soft
sculptures both deployed and derailed the everyday—transcending
banality and bending the senses toward the poetry of common things.
1
Claes Oldenburg, “Extracts from the Studio Notes (1962–64),” Artforum 4, no. 5 (January 1966): 32.
Ellipses in original text.
2
Mildred L. Glimcher, Happenings: New York, 1958–1963 (New York: Monacelli Press, 2012).
3
“Claes Oldenburg,” in Remembering Judson House, ed. Elly Dickason and Jerry G. Dickason
(New York: Judson Memorial Church, 2000), 298.
4
Mucha (b. Patricia Muschinski, 1935) attended the Milwaukee Art Institute and the Layton School of Design.
Jill Berk Jiminez, Dictionary of Artists’ Models (New York: Fritzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001), 385.
5
Joshua A. Shannon, “Claes Oldenburg’s ‘The Street’ and Urban Renewal in Greenwich Village, 1960,” The
Art Bulletin 86, no. 1 (2004): 145.
6
Achim Hochdörfer, Maartje Oldenburg, and Barbara Schröder, eds., Claes Oldenburg: Writing on the Side,
1956–1969 (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2013), 181–83.
7
Claes Oldenburg and Germano Celant, Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology (New York: Guggenheim Museum,
1995), 155.
8
Angelica Zander Rudenstine, Modern Painting, Drawing & Sculpture Collected by Emily and Joseph Pulitzer,
Jr., vol. 4 (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1988), 800.
9
For more on Oldenburg’s relationship to Jean Dubuffet, see Sophie Berrebi, “Paris Circus New York Junk:
Jean Dubuffet and Claes Oldenburg, 1959–1962,” Art History 21, no. 1 (February 2006): 79–107.
13
THE ORDINARY MUST NOT BE DULL
10
This sculpture was also a result of a commission by the State Department in 1963, on the occasion of
then Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s visit to Sweden. Having heard that the crown prince was an art
connoisseur, US government officials approached the Swedish-born Oldenburg to make a gift for the
occasion. Baked Potato II, however, fell short of the State Department’s expectations. Worried that it
would be offensive, the officials returned the sculpture to the artist. Rudenstine, Modern Painting,
Drawing & Sculpture, 800–01.
11
Patty Mucha, “Soft Sculpture Sunshine,” in Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968, ed. Sid
Sachs and Kalliopi Minioudaki (Philadelphia: University of the Arts, 2010), 144.
12
Ibid., 146
13
Claes Oldenburg, interview by Paul Cummings, December 4, 1973–January 25, 1974, Archives of American
Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 17, quoted in Maartje Oldenburg, “Chronology,” in Claes
Oldenburg: The Sixties, ed. Achim Hochdörfer (New York: Prestel, 2012), 288.
14
Patty Mucha recounts working on Green Beans during a cross-country trip from Los Angeles to New York:
“These beans resembled the wide Italian variety. Sewn from rich green vinyl, the outside sleeves each
measured about 16 inches long. Inside there were identically formed white bean seeds: poured Hydrocal
hardened from a rubber mold that Claes had designed. About 5 inches long, they fit nicely in one’s hand.
Each seed required some sanding, so whoever wasn’t driving spent time rubbing them down with fine sand
paper. A studio inside a moving car? Yup. Cough. Cough. White dust everywhere.” Mucha, “Soft Sculpture
Sunshine,” 157.
15
Hochdörfer, Oldenburg, and Schröder, Writing on the Side, 206.
16
Ibid., 208.
17
Barbara Haskell and Claes Oldenburg, Object into Monument (Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Art Museum, 1971),
105.
18
Claes Oldenburg, from a 1961 notebook entry, quoted in Barbara Rose, Claes Oldenburg (New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, 1969), 189.
19
Mucha, “Soft Sculpture Sunshine,” 150.
20
Ibid., 151.
21
Ibid., 149.
22
Haskell and Oldenburg, Object into Monument, 49.
23
Claes Oldenburg, quoted in Bruce Glaser, “Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, Warhol: A Discussion,” Artforum 4,
no. 6 (February 1966): 22.
24
Oldenburg and Celant, Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology, 21.
25
Hochdörfer, Oldenburg, and Schröder, Writing on the Side, 221–29.
26
“The Artist Speaks: Claes Oldenburg,” by John Coplans, Art in America 57, no. 2 (March 1969): 75.
27
Rose, Claes Oldenburg, 100.
28
Haskell and Oldenburg, Object into Monument, 42.
29
Ice Bag–Scale B, created in the edition of twenty-five, is an iteration of Oldenburg’s first kinetic sculpture,
Giant Ice Bag or Ice Bag–Scale A (1969), which he created for the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan. The
development of that sculpture grew out of his participation in the Art and Technology Program at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art—an initiative spearheaded by the curator Maurice Tuchman that sought
to pair artists with aerospace and technology companies. Ice Bag–Scale B was produced in collaboration
with Gemini G.E.L. Haskell and Oldenburg, Object into Monument, 106–07.
30
Oldenburg also used clothespins in Upside Down City (1962), an early soft sculpture that is in the collection
of the Walker Art Center.
31
Gerhard Storck and Coosje van Bruggen, Claes Oldenburg: The Haunted House (Essen, Germany: H. Gerd
Margreff, 1987).
32
Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen, and Germano Celant, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen:
Large Scale Projects (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1995).
33
Claes Oldenburg, quoted in Rose, Claes Oldenburg, 10. Italics in original.
14
PLATE 1
Baked Potato II, 1963
15
PLATE 2
French Fries and Ketchup, 1963
16
PLATE 3
Green Beans, 1964
17
PLATE 4
Soft Light Switches – “Ghost Version” II, 1964–71
18
PLATE 5
Soft Light Switches 1/2, 1964
19
PLATE 6
The Airflow – Top and Bottom, Front, Back and Sides, to be Folded into a Box
(Study for Cover of Art News), 1965 [mounted and resigned 1972]
20
PLATE 7
Soft Airflow, Scale 1 (Model), 1965
21
PLATE 8
Soft Tires for Airflow – Scale 5 (Model), 1965
22
PLATE 9
Soft Key, 1965
23
PLATE 10
Sculpture in the Form of a Fried Egg, 1966–71
24
PLATE 11
Three-Way Plug, Scale A (Soft), Prototype in Blue, 1971
25
PLATE 12
Ice Bag – Scale B, 1971
26
PLATE 13
Clothespin – 4 Ft. – (Soft Version), 1975
27
PLATE 14
Soft Folding Chair – Red, 1987
28
CHECKLIST OF THE EXHIBITION
All works by Claes Oldenburg
Baked Potato II, 1963
Burlap soaked in plaster, painted with enamel,
jersey stuffed with kapok
6 5/8 × 13 3/8 × 9 1/2 in (17 × 34 × 24 cm)
Private Collection
Soft Tires for Airflow – Scale 5 (Model), 1965
Canvas filled with kapok, impressed with patterns
in spray enamel
4 tires, each 30 in (76.2 cm) diameter × 7 1/2 in
(19.1 cm) deep
Private Collection
French Fries and Ketchup, 1963
Vinyl and kapok on wood base
Overall: 10 1/2 × 42 × 44 in (26.7 × 106.7 × 111.8 cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; 50th
Anniversary Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert M. Meltzer
Soft Key, 1965
Canvas stuffed with kapok, stenciled with enamel
36 1/2 × 17 1/2 × 1 in (92.7 × 44.5 × 2.5 cm)
Private Collection, England
Green Beans, 1964
Vinyl, and acrylic on plaster
Eighteen parts, each 2 × 11 3/4 × 5 in
(5.1 × 29.8 × 12.7 cm)
Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,
gift of Anne and William J. Hokin
Sculpture in the Form of a Fried Egg, 1966–71
Canvas, dyed cotton, expanded polystyrene
122 in (309.8 cm) diameter
Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago,
gift of Anne and William J. Hokin
Three-Way Plug, Scale A (Soft), Prototype in Blue,
1971
Naugahyde, wood, chain, plastic and wire
Overall: 144 × 77 × 59 in (365.8 × 195.6 × 149.9 cm)
Purchased with funds from the Coffin Fine Arts
Trust; Nathan Emory Coffin Collection of the Des
Moines Art Center
Soft Light Switches –“Ghost Version” II, 1964–71
Canvas filled with kapok, gesso, pencil
47 × 47 × 12 in (119.4 × 119.4 × 30.5 cm)
Collection of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van
Bruggen, Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Soft Light Switches 1/2, 1964
Vinyl and Dacron
47 × 47 × 3 5/8 in (119.4 × 119.4 × 9.2 cm)
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City,
Missouri
Gift of the Chapin Family in memory of Susan
Chapin Buckwalter
Ice Bag – Scale B, 1971
Nylon, fiberglass, mechanism, paint, lacquer,
blowers, anodized parts, steel, zipper, acrylic,
muslin, Velcro
Diameter: 48 1/4 in
Saint Louis Art Museum, Gift of Nancy Singer
11:1975
The Airflow –Top and Bottom, Front, Back and
Sides, to be Folded into a Box (Study for Cover of
Art News), 1965 [mounted and resigned 1972]
Collage
Sheet (irregular): 17 1/16 × 18 1/4 in (43.3 × 46.4 cm)
Mount (board): 25 7/8 × 23 1/4 × 1/16 in (65.7 × 59.1 ×
0.2 cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift
of The American Contemporary Art Foundation,
Inc., Leonard A. Lauder, President
Soft Airflow, Scale 1 (Model), 1965
Canvas filled with kapok, impressed with patterns
in sprayed enamel
15 × 22 × 12 in
Private Collection, Courtesy The Greenberg
Gallery, St. Louis
Clothespin – 4 Ft.– (Soft Version), 1975
Canvas painted with latex and filled with kapok
with metal hanger and wooden clothespins
56 1/2 × 16 × 4 in (143.5 × 40.6 × 10.2 cm)
Private Collection, Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery,
New York
Soft Folding Chair – Red, 1987
Canvas, polyurethane foam, latex
62 × 36 × 32 1/2 in (157.5 × 91.4 × 82.6 cm)
Private Collection, Courtesy The Greenberg
Gallery, St. Louis
32
This catalogue is published in conjunction with the exhibition The Ordinary Must
Not Be Dull: Claes Oldenburg’s Soft Sculptures, organized by Tamara H. Schenkenberg
and presented at Pulitzer Arts Foundation, July 29–October 15, 2016.
Designed by Jonathan Hanahan, Milieu
Edited by David B. Olsen and Stephanie Salomon
Printed by The Advertisers Printing Company, Inc.
ISBN: 978-0-9976901-0-1
© 2016 Pulitzer Arts Foundation
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any
other information storage and retrieval system, or otherwise without permission in writing
from the publisher.
All artwork © Claes Oldenburg
Image Credits
Pages 4, 6, 7, 9, 22: Photographs courtesy the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio. Pages 4, 6:
Photographs © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.M.7). Page
9: © Hans Hammarskiöld Heritage. Pages 15, 21, 28: Photographs by Jean Paul Torno. Pages
16, 20: Digital Images © Whitney Museum, N.Y. Pages 17, 24: Photographs by Nathan Keay,
© MCA Chicago. Pages 18, 23, 27: Photographs by Steven Probert.
Pulitzer Arts Foundation
3716 Washington Boulevard
St. Louis, MO 63108
314.754.1850
pulitzerarts.org | @pulitzerarts
Board of Trustees
Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Chair; William Bush, President; Bianca Pulitzer, Vice President;
Elkhanah Pulitzer, Vice President; James V. Maloney, Secretary & Treasurer; Cara Starke,
Ex Officio; Lee Broughton; James Cuno; Gary Garrels; Cara McCarty; Walter L. Metcalfe, Jr.;
Deborah Patterson; Angelica Zander Rudenstine; Kulapat Yantrasast
Other Works on View
Scott Burton
Rock Settee, 1988–1990
Granite
35 1/2 × 106 × 62 1/2 inches
Pulitzer Arts Foundation
Ellsworth Kelly
Blue Black, 2000
Painted aluminum panels
336 × 70 × 2 1/8 inches
Pulitzer Arts Foundation
Richard Serra
Joe, 1999
Weathering steel
Outer spiral approximately 163 × 576 × 480 inches
Pulitzer Arts Foundation
For more information on the exhibition, please email your questions to
[email protected].