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Contemporary criticism, interviews, scholarly reassessments, and texts by the artist focusing on Claes Oldenburg's sculptures, installations, and multimedia performances between 1960 and 1965. Claes Oldenburg (born in 1929) is largely known today as a pop art sculptor. Oldenburg himself described his formless canvas and vinyl soft sculptures—gigantic hamburgers and ice cream cones, cushiony toilets and typewriters—as “objects that elude definition.” This collection of writings revisits not only Oldenburg's soft objects from the early to mid 1960s but also his pioneering installations The Street (1960) and The Store (1961–1962) and his often overlooked multimedia performances. As the artist translated his ideas and beliefs into various media and formats, his work drew on a range of styles and schools, including abstract expressionism, Happenings, pop art, minimalism, and postminimalism. Perhaps because of their refusal to be classified, these artworks are as contemporary today as they were when they were created between 1960 and 1965. This collection serves both as a summation of early critical thinking on Oldenburg's art and a starting point for consideration of the artist as a forerunner of current art trends of stylelessness and intermediality. It includes both contemporary criticism and more recent scholarly reassessments, interviews with the artist, and Oldenburg's own unpublished manifesto on the Ray Gun Theater (the artist's name for his performance series in the back of The Store).

Much of the seminal 1960s sculpture documented in this catalogue is from Claes Oldenburg's personal collection and had never been shown until it was gathered on the occasion of the artist's first major historical New York exhibition since his Guggenheim retrospective of 1995. Included are a large selection of objects from The Store; early soft sculptures from The Home; and works related to the Airflow project. Scholars and new initiates alike will enjoy Oldenburg's earliest riffs on street life (yard-long gym shoes), household objects (plump fabric light switches and toilets) and automobile culture, explored and transformed through innovative manipulations of scale and material into mysterious, formally inventive works that address human experience in modern life. An insightful essay by Julia E. Robinson points to relationships with the work of Daumier, Dubuffet and Manet.

Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) first made his mark on the New York art scene in the early 1960s, and from that time he has been widely regarded as one of America's most influential and appealing artists. His subject matter is the everyday object - food, clothing, mechanical devices, and the like - which he reincarnates into witty and provocative sculptures ranging in scale from the intimate to the expansive. This volume, published to accompany a major retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, is the most comprehensive to date on Oldenburg and his multifaceted art. Interweaving photographs of installations and Happenings, texts, and new reproductions of the sculptures and drawings, this lavishly produced book traces Oldenburg's entire career. Among the subjects presented are The Street, his early exhibition devoted to the street life of New York City; The Store, his infamous array of painted plaster sculptures of food and clothing, which he sold in a Manhattan storefront; the celebrated soft sculptures; his drawings for fanciful monuments; and the large-scale public projects made in collaboration with Coosje van Bruggen.

La exposición constituye una muestra retrospectiva de la obra de Oldenburg, refleja los temas que preocupan al artista, influidos por las ideas de su esposa, Cosje van Bruggen, y permite conocer aspectos insólitos de sus métodos de trabajo, partiendo de las ideas, a través de los bocetos y los modelos pequeños y grandes hasta llegar a las esculturas acabadas, revelando el modo en que los objetos estereotipados, materia prima del repertorio de Oldenburg, sufren sorprendentes transformaciones mediante cambios radicales de escala, material y entorno, convirtiéndose en objetos nuevos que ya no poseen su significado o función original.

"The multiple form is in many ways one of the most appealing aspects of the work of the American Pop artist Claes Oldenburg. Related to the print, the multiple is understood to refer to a small sculpture produced in a relatively large edition. All of Oldenburg's multiples, along with their production histories, are presented here for the first time. Avidly sought after by collectors today, these works range from the first multiple, the California Ray Guns, of 1963-64, to the present, and include a new multiple, The Soap at Baton Rouge, conceived in 1990 as a dissolved remainder of a fantastic proposal for the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, in the form of a colossal bar of Ivory Soap. Oldenburg's multiples represent Pop art in its quintessence, challenging the idea of status and exclusivity in art and the limitation of the dissemination of artistic concepts. Oldenburg's multiples, however, are a natural outgrowth of his sculptural concerns in general - the pleasure of recognition of familiar objects, humor, and sensuality. Thus, the multiples - plaster-cast, vacuum-formed, produced in gelatin molds - include works like the Wedding Souvenir of 1966, a repeated single slice of wedding cake; London Knees 1966 (from 1968), the many-echoed sawed-off pair of legs from a mannequin; and the fanciful Geometric Mouse, from the 1970s. In addition to Oldenburg's own notes on his multiples, this publication includes a provocative introductory essay, a complete catalogue raisonné, and a bibliography." --

Large-scale quasi catalogue raisonné of drawing and prints by Claes Oldenburg executed between 1958 - 1967. Contains introduction and commentary by Gene Baro, chronology, and raisonné for drawings and prints. While, in fact, this book purports to be a raisonné, and goes to great lengths to document Oldenburg's drawings, it lacks documentation of a large number of drawings executed within the period. However, this book is an extremely valuable document in that it lavishly reproduces a large number of the artist's works and indexes 369 drawings and 9 prints.