(Swedish, b. January 28, 1929)

Claes Oldenburg is an American sculptor, best known for his public art installations representing for most of them gigantic versions of everyday objects. He has jokingly been called "the thinking man's Walt Disney." Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of normally hard objects and drawings .

Born January 28, 1929, in Stockholm, Claes Oldenburg is a son of a diplomat. His family arrived in the United States in 1936 where they first settled in New York before moving to Chicago. From 1946 to 1950, Oldenburg studied literature and art history at Yale University, New Haven. Then, he returned to Chicago where he studied under the direction of Paul Weighardt at the Art Institute of Chicago until 1954.

“From 1956 to 1959, Claes Oldenburg concentrated on figurative drawings in landscapes and domestic interiors. He worked with a black grease crayon to achieve  an open, impressionistic style of rendering. The drawings of this period are characterized by Oldenburg’s energetic gesture, immediacy of line, and a concern with form, light and space, qualities that would remain integral to his developing style.

Beginning in the fall of 1956, Oldenburg moved into a studio on 12^th street and made drawings of familiar objects. On speaking of that moment he has said : ‘I was very lonely, and those objects were my company ;  bottle caps, razo blades, my stove, ink bottle.”  It is also at this time that the subject of Oldenburg’s focus changed and he began to devote himself to capturing the forms and textures of urban life in New York.

Claes Oldenburg
Pat on Vespa
Oil on Canvas
55.25 x 51
1959 - 1960

In a group of drawings produced in 1959-1960, which he called the “ Street” drawings, he used pencils and crayon to document the images, actions, sounds, and thoughts that he experienced in the course of his walks through the city. [Most of] these works reveal the loneliness, pain, and squalor he observed around him, in the people, the objects, and the situations that made up the life of the street. Yet at the same time he incorporates humor into his depiction. [1]” Pat on Vespa  is a perfect example of his early work based on the mark-making and the subject depicted. This series was exhibited in 1959 at the Judson Gallery.

“In 1961, he opened The Store in his studio, where he recreated the environment of neighborhood shops. He displayed familiar objects made out of plaster, reflecting American society’s celebration of consumption, and was soon heralded as a Pop artist with the emergence of the movement in 1962.

Oldenburg realized his first outdoor public monument in 1967; Placid Civic Monument took the form of a Conceptual performance/action behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, with a crew of gravediggers digging a six-by-three-foot rectangular hole in the ground. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he also proposed colossal art projects for several cities, and by 1969, his first such iconic work, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, was installed at Yale University. Most of his large-scale projects were made with the collaboration of Coosje van Bruggen, whom he married in 1977.

Oldenburg was honored with a solo exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1969, and with a retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Solomon R.

[1] Claes Oldenburg Drawings 1959-1977, catalogue of exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, June7th-September 15^th, 2002, Harry N. Abrams, INC., New York, 2002, p.10