Remembering Claes Oldenburg, 1929–2022

Claes Oldenburg’s audacious, witty, and profound depictions of everyday objects changed the way we understand and see art in the world. Beginning in 1962, his sculptures, prints, drawings, and installations appeared in more than 100 exhibitions at MoMA; 60 years later, his work is currently on view in our collection galleries. Here, we pay tribute to the artist through his iconic 1961 artist statement; an excerpt of an autobiographical text from a decade later; a link to the first major monograph on the artist by Barbara Rose, commissioned by MoMA in 1969; a curator’s remembrance of his imprint on New York City; and archival audio.

I AM FOR...

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.
I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all, an art given the chance of having a starting point of zero.
I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap and still comes out on top.
I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.
I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

I am for an artist who vanishes, turning up in a white cap painting signs or hallways.

I am for art that comes out of a chimney like black hair and scatters in the sky.
I am for art that spills out of an old man’s purse when he is bounced off a passing fender.
I am for the art out of a doggie’s mouth, falling five stories from the roof.
I am for the art that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper.
I am for an art that joggles like everyone’s knees, when the bus traverses an excavation.
I am for art that is smoked like a cigarette, smells like a pair of shoes.
I am for art that flaps like a flag, or helps blow noses like a handkerchief.
I am for art that is put on and taken off like pants, which develops holes like socks, which is eaten like a piece of pie, or abandoned with great contempt like a piece of shit.

I am for art covered with bandages. I am for art that limps and rolls and runs and jumps.
I am for art that comes in a can or washes up on the shore.
I am for art that coils and grunts like a wrestler. I am for art that sheds hair.
I am for art you can sit on. I am for art you can pick your nose with or stub your toes on.
I am for art from a pocket, from deep channels of the ear, from the edge of a knife, from the corners of the mouth, stuck in the eye or worn on the wrist.
I am for art under the skirts, and the art of pinching cockroaches.

I am for the art of conversation between the sidewalk and a blind man’s metal stick.
I am for the art that grows in a pot, that comes down out of the skies at night, like lightning, that hides in the clouds and growls. I am for art that is flipped on and off with a switch.
I am for art that unfolds like a map, that you can squeeze, like your sweetie’s arm, or kiss like a pet dog. Which expands and squeaks like an accordion, which you can spill your dinner on like an old tablecloth.
I am for an art that you can hammer with, stitch with, sew with, paste with, file with.
I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is.
I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.

I am for the art of the washing machine. I am for the art of a government check. I am for the art of last war’s raincoat.
I am for the art that comes up in fogs from sewer holes in winter. I am for the art that splits when you step on a frozen puddle. I am for the worm’s art inside the apple. I am for the art of sweat that develops between crossed legs.
I am for the art of neck hair and caked teacups, for the art between the tines of restaurant forks, for the odor of boiling dishwater.

I am for the art of sailing on Sunday, and the art of red-and-white gasoline pumps.
I am for the art of bright blue factory columns and blinking biscuit signs.
I am for the art of cheap plaster and enamel. I am for the art of worn marble and smashed slate. I am for the art of rolling cobblestones and sliding sand. I am for the art of slag and black coal. I am for the art of dead birds.
I am for the art of scratching in the asphalt, daubing at the walls. I am for the art of bending and kicking metal and breaking glass, and pulling at things to make them fall down.

I am for the art of punching and skinned knees and sat-on bananas. I am for the art of kids’ smells. I am for the art of mama-babble.
I am for the art of bar-babble, tooth-picking, beer-drinking, egg-salting, in-sulting. I am for the art of falling off a barstool.

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice-cream cones dropped on concrete. I am for the majestic art of dog turds, rising like cathedrals.

I am for the blinking arts, lighting up the night. I am for art falling, splashing, wiggling, jumping, going on and off.
I am for the art of fat truck tires and black eyes.
I am for Kool art, 7UP art, Pepsi art, Sunshine art, 39 cents art, 15 cents art, Vatronol art, Dro-bomb art, Vam art, Menthol art, L&M art, Ex-lax art, Venida art, Heaven Hill art, Pamryl art, San-o-med art, Rx art, 9.99 art, Now art, New art, How art, Fire Sale art, Last Chance art, Only art, Diamond art, Tomorrow art, Franks art, Ducks art, Meat-o-rama art.
I am for the art of bread wet by rain. I am for the rat’s dance between floors. I am for the art of flies walking on a slick pear in the electric light. I am for the art of soggy onions and firm green shoots. I am for the art of clicking among the nuts when the roaches come and go. I am for the brown sad art of rotting apples.
I am for the art of meows and clatter of cats and for the art of their dumb electric eyes.
I am for the white art of refrigerators and their muscular openings and closings.
I am for the art of rust and mold. I am for the art of hearts, funeral hearts or sweetheart hearts, full of nougat. I am for the art of worn meat hooks and singing barrels of red, white, blue, and yellow meat.
I am for the art of things lost or thrown away, coming home from school. I am for the art of cock-and-ball trees and flying cows and the noise of rectangles and squares. I am for the art of crayons and weak, gray pencil lead, and grainy wash and sticky oil paint, and the art of windshield wipers and the art of the finger on a cold window, on dusty steel or in the bubbles on the sides of a bathtub.

I am for the art of teddy bears and guns and decapitated rabbits, exploded umbrellas, raped beds, chairs with their brown bones broken, burning trees, firecracker ends, chicken bones, pigeon bones, and boxes with men sleeping in them.
I am for the art of slightly rotten funeral flowers, hung bloody rabbits and wrinkly yellow chickens, bass drums and tambourines, and plastic phonographs.

I am for the art of abandoned boxes, tied like pharaohs. I am for an art of water tanks and speeding clouds and flapping shades.

I am for US Government Inspected Art, Grade A art, Regular Price art, Yellow Ripe art, Extra Fancy art, Ready-to-Eat art, Best-for-Less art, Ready-to-Cook art, Fully Cleaned art, Spend Less art, Eat Better art, Ham art, pork art, chicken art, tomato art, banana art, apple art, turkey art, cake art, cookie art…
—Claes Oldenburg, 1961

NOTES FOR AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (excerpt)

The justification for an autobiography is that the work always arises out of experience, changes its character in relation to experience, and is always best understood in relation to a particular experience. The other justification is that an artist’s life ought to have structure, or he ought to be able to shape it into a structure in retrospect, as a good (or bad) example. He must account for himself—or that’s how I feel. Every day, in writing notes, in making entries in my diary, or in defending my work and behavior, that is what I do, and a collection of all that, trimmed, will lead to an autobiography, if these scraps
are not to remain scraps.
[...]
Songs of Professor Dog.

The Artist, in my thinking, is always another person. I would and do refer to him in the third person—“he.” I am he, but I am also not he, I am also the observer of he, and I am, when I am not he, much more difficult (impossible) to define. The Artist is a helpful simplification of my existence, a helpful role. I was formless until I found this role, and therefore quite unsatisfied. My autobiography is about myself (the unknown) looking at him (my role).

I have no shape, but he will have shape, the fiction of myself, any shape that I can give him. Plastic Man.

I have gone through many changes of attitude, each change involving a substitution of place, people, and circumstances generally. Signs and symbols have always announced the change. Some facts begin to seem more important than others. I watch, fascinated, for a while, until a pattern emerges and from the pattern, a direction. Because the pattern takes a long time to develop, this familiarity and growth makes for a sense of certainty when it does arrive at shape. Art is decision making on a high level (or ought to be).
—Claes Oldenburg, c. 1970–72

Both texts were published in Claes Oldenburg: Writing on the Side 1956–1969, edited by Achim Hochdörfer, Maartje Oldenburg, and Barbara Schröder, 2013.

You can also read Barbara Rose’s monograph on the artist, published to accompany his 1969 exhibition at MoMA.

I can’t think of Claes Oldenburg without thinking of New York. Of course, there was Claes’s store on East Second Street that even now, more than half a century later, still turns our understanding of art on its head: Who made it? Who bought it? what was it? I think of the now-mythical studio on 14th Street onto which he transposed the island of Manhattan (so, the kitchen was called the Upper West Side, and the bedroom the Lower East—I may have this mixed up but you get the idea). There’s the 1964 photograph, taken by Ugo Mulas, of Claes standing in the middle of Broadway, backlit by the afternoon sun. Before all of this there was The Street, Oldenburg’s private New York transformed into art by way of a gritty and delirious installation.

And long after this, I would look with Claes from his studio window as the view, day by day, became eclipsed by the ever-transforming New York landscape of usually slick and always expensive apartment buildings that displaced his latter-day haunts. And when I think of Claes, I always hear the 1963 song by the Exciters (who hailed from Queens!) called “Tell Him.” Claes used it in one of his early films, a work we included when we staged Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store at MoMA in 2013. The song rang through the galleries at predictable intervals, digging itself deep into your head—“Tell him that you’re never gonna leave him/ Tell him that you’re always gonna love him /Tell him, tell him, tell him, tell him right now.” It’s a song about romantic love, but COLOSSAL love, we know, swallows the romantic kind in a single gulp. Claes died earlier today in New York; New York and the world lost a brilliant artist with a mind as unbridled and expansive as I have ever known. I never told him I thought so, but considering who we’re talking about, I’m quite certain he knew.
—Paulina Pobocha, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, July 18, 2022

Audio

“The people in the neighborhood were pretty terrified. They didn’t know what was going on. So they didn’t come in. However, certain people interested in art dropped in, and people bought things. Andy Warhol came and he bought a shirt. And other artists came in and bought things. So it was a good experience.”

Listen to the artist speak about his work, along with commentary from the Museum’s director and curators.

And from the 2013 exhibition Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store / Mouse Museum and Ray Gun