He divided his time between Manhattan and a small village in Sarthe, but his works are everywhere. In Paris, a giant bike half buried in a lawn in the Parc de la Villette from which only a few elements emerge, and in particular a fragment of a wheel that delights the kids, who use it as a slide. In Kassel (Germany), a pickaxe intended for very, very, very tall people. In the garden of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City (United States), oversized badminton shuttlecocks that have become the venue’s logo. In Tokyo, a handsaw attacking a lawn by the roadside and threatening to attack the footbridge overhanging it. An ice cream cone (12 meters high) crushed on the top of a building in Cologne, or even a toilet made of soft rubber, on the seat of which no sensible person, even in a great hurry, would dare to step. Sit.
Finally, at the Venice Biennale, in September 1985, a strange galley in the shape of a Swiss army knife, created with his wife Coosje van Bruggen (1942-2009) and the complicity of many friends, including the architect Frank Gehry, who for three days played the Bucentaures for a performance titled The Course of the Knife. Everyday objects, magnified by the size and also by the humor of a master of pop art, the American Claes Oldenburg, who died on July 18 in New York at the age of 93.
Everyday objects, magnified by size and humor
Born on January 28, 1929 in Stockholm, the son of a diplomat and an opera singer, he grew up in Chicago before taking classes at Yale University (and those, given in the evening, at the Art Institute of Chicago ), then to become a journalist. In 1956, in New York, he met many artists including Allan Kaprow (1927-2006), considered one of the fathers of the happening. This encouraged him in this practice, which he nevertheless made more sculptural with works like The Street (1959) an accumulation of rubbish, or The Store (1960 then 1961), a real store on the Lower East Side (his neighborhood, which is not the most upscale) in the window of which he presents consumer products.
But, unlike the new realists who would have used real objects, his are sculpted (in collaboration with his first wife, Patricia Muschinski, known as Patty Mucha, also an artist) with fabric and colored plaster. The showcase of The Store offered customers an ice cream in its cone (approximately 3 meters long), a hamburger (1.5 meters by 2 meters) and a slice of cake (2.7 meters)…
You have 45.01% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.