Remembering Claes Oldenburg

With the passing of artist Claes Oldenburg (US, b. Sweden, 1929–2022), we have lost not only a major voice in postwar American art but one whose work has been a cornerstone of the Walker’s collection from the early days of his career. An artist who believed in the interpretation and interrelation of art and life, Oldenburg made multimedia performances and artistic projects rooted in popular culture that mirrored the human experience in surprising and sometimes unsettling ways. Continuing traditions begun by such movements as Surrealism and Art Brut, which emphasized the role of the unconscious and unrefined in art, Oldenburg uncovered the mystery and power of commonplace objects by morphing their scale, shape, and texture, embracing what he called “the poetry of everywhere.”

The artist’s inventive working process was cumulative. He would order his impressions of the world through sketches and writings in his ever-present notebooks; models and drawings formed another layer of thinking. Some ideas were realized as sculptures, ranging from the intimately scaled to the monumental, while others underwent a years-long period of study and change.

The Walker Art Center has the great privilege to be home to an in-depth collection of more than 350 of Oldenburg’s works, ranging from early performance-related objects to large-scale outdoor sculptures to drawings, prints, multiples, and rare studies. The most celebrated among these works is the monumental Spoonbridge and Cherry (1985–1988), a fountain sculpture created with his wife and artistic collaborator, Coosje van Bruggen, which remains the centerpiece of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. The artist’s work the subject of three solo exhibitions at the Walker—in 1975, 1992, and 2013—and was included in numerous group exhibitions at the museum.

Born in Stockholm in 1929 and raised in Chicago by diplomat parents, Oldenburg moved to New York in 1956. In 1960 he staged his first major project, entitled The Street, at the Judson Gallery. Responding both to the urban environment where he lived and worked and to the flattened perspective of cartoon illustrations, Oldenburg covered the walls of the gallery with torn and crudely painted collages made from gritty, cast-off materials such as cardboard and burlap. The cutouts depicted inhabitants of New York’s Bowery neighborhood, including a Street Chick and an entity known as Ray Gun (also the artist’s alter ego), characters that exemplified the seamy side of the city.

In 1961 Oldenburg presented The Store, an enterprise combining sculpture and performance, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He filled a vacant storefront, which he called the Ray Gun Manufacturing Co., with hundreds of plaster and papier-mâché replicas of common products such as shirts, shoes, slices of pie, and baked potatoes—all made in the back of the shop. These items were often larger than life, lumpy, misshapen, and garishly painted, and were sold as regular merchandise. The Store marked the first sounding of a main theme in Oldenburg’s art—the exclusive use of inanimate objects to convey meaning. As he wrote in his now-famous manifesto of 1961: “I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself. . . . I am for U.S. Government Inspected art, Grade A art, Regular Price art, Yellow Ripe art, Extra Fancy art, ready-to-eat art . . . an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.”

During his early years in New York, Oldenburg became involved with a close-knit group of artists, including Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, and Lucas Samaras, who sought to create an iconoclastic form of “total art.” Their projects, known as “Happenings,” were live events that combined acting, painting, sculpture, music, poetry, dance, and film. Inanimate objects in the Happenings were on equal footing with the performers, with props salvaged from the events often emerging as sculptures in their own right, as in the case of Oldenburg’s Upside Down City, an early work in the Walker’s collection that is a remnant from the 1962 performance World’s Fair II. The Happening began with two actors removing various objects from the pockets of an inert man and from a large trunk, then placing them on a table. Subsequent sections focused on different areas of the room, and the event concluded with the performers suspending the inverted cityscape from the ceiling. Resembling hanging laundry, odd reptiles, or invented letterforms, the constructions of painted newspaper-stuffed fabric were key for Oldenburg in that they marked the beginnings of his work with “soft” sculpture, which would become an abiding interest and which he would explore with then-new materials (vinyl, fake fur, foam rubber) as well as traditional “painting” fabrics (canvas and muslin).

A soft sculpture from 1966, Shoestring Potatoes Spilling from a Bag is another longtime favorite work in the Walker collection. It was originally conceived as part of a grouping of soft fast-food items—french fries, ketchup, and cola—and was based on an advertisement the artist had seen in a 1965 issue of Life magazine. By inverting the shoestring potatoes and applying gravity, his “favorite form creator,” Oldenburg produced a new entity that took on a life of its own and, as he had done with Upside Down City, he further challenged convention by creating sculpture from painted canvas. Various relationships to the potatoes were examined in the pages of Oldenburg’s notebooks, through drawings, clippings, and notations. In one drawing, the artist compared the french fries, ketchup bottle, and cola glass to a cathedral, a chapel, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, respectively.

It is this process of free association that was, most engagingly, at the heart of Oldenburg’s work. He had an innate inclination to classify and order forms, a tendency enhanced by his incisive visual memory and pliant imagination. “I like best,” he noted in 1965, “an elementary idea which turns, by itself, into a surprising suggestive object, as through material action.” By systematically examining his spontaneous responses to his subjects, the artist recognized both obvious and hidden relationships. Over the course of his career, Oldenburg would use this process to chart the lineage of many leitmotifs—the clothespin, three-way electric plug, geometric mouse, or soft alphabet, for example—to which he would return time and again for inspiration.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, Oldenburg began to conceive of works that he termed “colossal monuments,” familiar objects enlarged to Brobdingnagian proportions that could be seen as alternatives to traditional public sculpture. Often, the ideas arose from the artist superimposing an image of an object on a landscape, either in the form of a collaged study, as seen in the printed postcard studies for the 1968 multiple London Knees 1966 (realized as a life-size object), or a drawing, such as the 1965 Colossal Floating Three-Way Plug (realized in a variety of scales and materials, including the Walker’s 1975 Naugahyde version, Three-Way Plug—Scale A, Soft, Brown). The objects Oldenburg chose for these proposed monuments were conceived with a grand scale traditionally reserved for memorial architecture. By proposing, for example, a museum building formed from a tobacco can and cigarette package or a hybrid “vehicle” made from a giant lipstick poised on the treads of a bulldozer, Oldenburg heightened his subject’s abstract qualities to inspire a sense of wonder in forms usually overlooked.

From the mid-1970s to 2009, Oldenburg made works in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen (1942–2009). The process behind their proposals for what they termed “large-scale projects” was integral to the work, regardless of whether a piece was ultimately realized. Over a period that could last years, an idea based on their impressions of a site would be developed through drawings and models. Spoonbridge and Cherry, one of the artists’ few fountain pieces, was commissioned by the Walker in 1985, during the planning of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. A number of associations about Minnesota played into the choice of subject. The artists conceived of the sculpture as the focal point of the walk from the museum to the center of the Garden. Not wanting to overshadow the surrounding sculptures, however, the artists’ aim was to create something that would “catch the eye and . . . lie down and be horizontal.” The spoon had been an element of Oldenburg’s visual vocabulary since 1962, when he bought a novelty spoon that rested on an “island” of imitation chocolate. Drawings, prints, and unrealized proposals involving the spoon followed, including the idea of a Chicago pier extending into Lake Michigan, and a bridge near New York’s Park Avenue. Oldenburg had continued to think of the spoon as being “something flung out over water.” It was van Bruggen who suggested the addition of the cherry, as well as the shape of the pool, which is inspired by the seed of the linden tree, a prominent planting in the Garden.

The sculpture Spoonbridge and Cherry, now an iconic symbol for the Twin Cities, is a lasting testament to the legacy both artists left with this community. Today, we at the Walker remember Oldenburg fondly, from his early collaboration with former Walker director, the late Martin Friedman (1925–2016) on his first US museum retrospective in 1975, to his subsequent exhibitions here and ongoing engagement with our collection. Oldenburg enjoyed hosting Walker staff past and present for an occasional tea at his New York studio. The building, which formerly housed a company that made parts for marine engines, is equipped with an antique elevator that the artist would operate by hand, as he shuttled visitors between the floors, telling jokes and sharing anecdotes along the way. With its walls filled with shelves containing an enchanting array of “stuff”—small sculptural models, souvenirs, and myriad found objects waiting to be reimagined into sculpture—a visit to the studio was like a glimpse into the artist’s unfettered imagination, and an experience of a generous spirit that will continue to delight through his work. He will be greatly missed.