Word: oldenburg
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...come of age; it has -such is the accelerated pulse of art movements today-almost become venerable. As a sure sign of esteem, New York's Guggenheim is now holding a retrospective of the comic-strip-inspired works of Roy Lichtenstein, and the saggy, baggy sculptures of Claes Oldenburg are on display at the Museum of Modern Art. The Whitney Museum, not to be outdone, will exhibit another major Pop artist, Jim Dine, in February...
...their painterly quality, Jim Dine's for their intimacy. But each seems to have settled into the styles established by his own success. The one among them who seems to have continuously moved into progressively new and different areas, blithely leaving his successes behind him, is Claes Oldenburg...
Table Volcano. A big, burly man who looks like a scholarly truck driver or an agile Bacchus, Oldenburg is shy but not modest. "I am a magician," he says. "A magician brings dead things to life." His sculptures of food, for example. Typical, terrible American cuisine fascinates him, the kinds of things dieters like Oldenburg himself try to avoid: a wedge of pecan pie, a banana sundae, racks of assorted pastry, ice cream, cheeseburgers. Made of plaster, slathered with lush enamel paint, these goodies actually seem ready for the consumer's fork and spoon. But like four-color advertisements...
...Oldenburg sees the world with eyes as fresh and intent as a child's, and he notices everything. He has collected, for instance, stubbed-out cigarettes. "Everybody puts out a cigarette in a different way, and these are particularly nervous ones," he explains. "A fag end is a basic geometric form-a cylinder-that is altered by a very natural action when it is put out. This interests...
...soft sculptures are, of course, the magician's most famous trick. Thfir success lies in their invitation to be touched and poked and in their quality of surprise. Where other artists in the past would change the color or shape of the objects they treated, Oldenburg keeps those qualities as they are and instead changes their context (a hamburger sits on the floor), size (small things become gigantic) and state (soft instead of hard). The result is a sculpture of enormous intellectual compression; it shows the stress of gravity, the effect of age, the possibility of sensuality...