Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology, the first comprehensive exhibition since 1969 surveying the highly original art of Claes Oldenburg, opens at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on October 6, 1995. The exhibition, which is curated by Germano Celant, Cu rator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim Museum, remains on view at the Guggenheim through January 14, 1996, with a section devoted to later works on view through January 21.

The exhibition fills the museum's entire spiral rotunda and top two Tower galleries with approximately 200 of Oldenburg's most important drawings, collages, and sculptures from 1958 to the present, documenting the career of this versatile and remarkably prolific artist, who came to prominence as a key figure of Pop art in the early 1960s. Included are his well-known "hard," "soft," and "ghost" sculptures of food and household objects; drawings, film, props, and costumes from installations created for performances and theatrical events; drawings for his proposed colossal monuments; and models, drawings, and documentation for his feasible monuments and the large-scale projects he has produced in collaboration with author and art historian Coosje van Bruggen. Among the special highlights of the Guggenheim's exhibition is a brand new work of art, Soft Shuttlecock (1995), based on Oldenburg's most recent large-scale project with van Bruggen and created by them especially for installation at the museum.

This exhibition is generously supported by Swiss Bank Corporation. The exhibition is coorganized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and is presented in association with The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, and the Hayward Gallery, London.

Oldenburg was born in Stockholm, Sweden on January 28, 1929. The family moved to Chicago in 1936, and, following his education at Yale University (where he received a B.A. in English and Art in 1952), Oldenburg returned to Chicago, where he became a reporter for the City News Bureau and attended the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 1956, Oldenburg moved to New York, where he lives today. His first public solo show at a New York gallery took place in 1959 at the Judson Gallery, and his soft sculpture was exhibited for the first time at the Green Gallery in 1962. In 1965, Oldenburg began making proposals for colossal monuments. His collaboration with Coosje van Bruggen dates from 1976. They were married in 1977.

Throughout his career, Oldenburg has used the metamorphic potential of familiar objects to create new forms and infuse the commonplace with life, wit, and alternative meanings. Since its earliest manifestations, Oldenburg's art has been tied to special environments often created for performances ("Happenings"). These installations and theatrical events are documented throughout the exhibition in the form of drawings, film, props, and costumes. The large-scale Houseball (1985), for example, which is located on the museum's great rotunda floor, is a prop from the 1985 theatrical piece Il Corso del Coltello (The Course of the Knife), produced by Oldenburg and van Bruggen in collaboration with the architect Frank O. Gehry.

The earliest works in the exhibition date from Oldenburg's first installation in 1960, The Street. Made from common materials such as cardboard and burlap, these objects include forms in the shapes of cars, signs, and figures that the artist painted in a rough graffiti style. Oldenburg's earliest performance, Snapshots from the City, took place within this environment at Judson Gallery. The artist characterized this work as "fragments of action immobilized by instantaneous illuminations." His Happenings were an extension into live art of his assemblages and environments, relating to his sculpture in their references to everyday life and their emphasis on visual and spatial relationships.

Also included in Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology are works made for his installation of the following year, The Store. After a partial presentation at Martha Jackson Gallery, the installation was fully realized in a storefront on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where the artist functioned as both manufacturer and purveyor of his work. Writing about the works in the exhibition catalogue, curator Celant notes, "The Store is not only part of the history of art, but of the city as well. It was a three-dimensional painting inscribed in the corridor of paintings that was East Second Street and its shopping windows. It was a tangible space; its perspective was not illusory, but real." The objects in The Store, brightly painted plaster reliefs and sculptures executed in different scales, were inspired by shop-window merchandise the artist encountered in his neighborhood: food, fragments of advertisements, clothing, and household goods. "I take the materials from the surrounding in the Lower East Side and transform them and give them back," the artist said. These objects have a deliberately sensuous, even vulgar character, their rough surfaces splashed and dripped with commercial paint.

Also dating from the 1960s are examples of Oldenburg's soft and hard, large and small sculptures based on everyday objects, ranging from household fixtures such as toilets, fans, and light switches to foodstuffs and Manhattan maps. All of the soft sculptures exist in a state of constant permutation, responding to physical manipulation and the capacity to be reformed (or modeled) with each installation. Oldenburg prepared one of his early vinyl pieces, Soft Pay-Telephone (1963), by first constructing a version in white muslin, which he painted in white acrylic and drew on in graphite. These white fabric "maquettes," which Oldenburg eventually dubbed as "ghost" versions, proved to be an effective way for the artist to experiment with forms.

Giant Soft Drum Set (1967), with its many parts constructed of vinyl, wood, and canvas, is among his most complex soft sculptures. While the piece was inspired partly by the dramatic sight and sound of thunderheads above the mountainous skyline of Colorado (where Oldenburg spent the summer at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies), it also relates to the architecture of the Guggenheim Museum, where it was shown in an international sculpture show in fall 1967. According to the artist, the individual drums are essentially "circles in space"; when assembled, the work makes manifest the nature of "soft circles and what they do in a heap."

Oldenburg's later soft sculptures are sewn from vinyl or canvas and stuffed with filler material to achieve varying degrees of flaccidity, his method of "modeling." A 1992 group of soft sculptures returns to the subject matter of musical instruments, fea turing saxophones, harps, and clarinets, whose precise forms serve as a foil for sculptural statements about defunctionalization and decomposition. Like the drum set, Oldenburg's soft saxophones allude to the human figure, whether in the yellow Soft Saxophone, Scale A, Muslin (1992), which lies prone, or in the large white Soft Saxophone, Scale B (1992), made on the scale of a figure that sits gracefully upright on its pedestal.

One room of the exhibition is devoted to Bedroom Ensemble, Replica II, a full-scale, stylized bedroom suite that replicates the room of the Sidney Janis Gallery where it was originally shown in New York in 1964. Oldenburg designed the installation during a seven-month stay in Venice, California, in 1963-64, when he began to develop ideas on the theme of The Home. Inspired by a Malibu motel room recalled from a visit in 1947, the work was Oldenburg's initiation into the process of professional fabrication. The transition from The Street to The Home has been expressed by Oldenburg as "Street equals drawing. Store equals painting. Furniture equals sculpture."

The exhibition also includes a series of drawings documenting Oldenburg's designs for proposed colossal monuments, as well as models and drawings documenting later large-scale projects, which, since 1976, have been done in collaboration with van Bruggen. One series of drawings presents fantastic proposals for sculptures that represent everyday objects enlarged to gargantuan proportions in relation to a particular place, such as Proposed Colossal Monument for Central Park North, New York City: Teddy Bear (1965), and Proposed Colossal Monument for Park Avenue, New York: Good Humor Bar (1965). Oldenburg employed the term "monument" ironically, for his anti-heroic subjects deliberately subvert traditional notions of public sculpture. Beginning in 1969, a number of the artist's "feasible" proposals were actually built. His first realized monument was Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, which is prominently featured on the museum's great Frank Lloyd Wright Rotunda floor. This piece was originally commissioned by graduate architecture students at Yale University and installed there in 1969.

With van Bruggen, Oldenburg has created 26 large-scale outdoor projects that have been realized in many urban settings in the United States and Europe. These include Spoonbridge and Cherry (1988) in the sculpture garden of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; Inverted Collar and Tie (1994) in Frankfurt, Germany; and Shuttlecocks (1994) at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. The large-scale projects are related to their sites both formally and conceptually, and are presented in this exhibition through drawings, models, and video documentation.

Between 1987 and 1990, van Bruggen and Oldenburg also undertook a series of indoor projects for European venues. From the Entropic Library (Model) (1989-90), a model for the sculpture included in the 1989 Paris exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, draws from the European tradition of still-life paintings, depicting torn books, toppled bookends, and a shattered lightbulb. Fragments of From the Entropic Library are echoed in subsequent, smaller-scale sculptures entitled Torn Notebooks (1992), composed of fluttering pages barely held together by spiral bindings. In several of his most recent works, Oldenburg has returned to food subjects, with Geometric Apple Core (1991) and Leaning Fork with Meatball and Spaghetti (1994) implying processes of change and decomposition through the consumed apple and the precarious position of the top-heavy fork.

Exhibition Tour

Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology opened at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (February 12-May 7, 1995) and then travelled to The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (July 2-September 3, 1995). Following its presentation in New York, the exhibition travels to the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn (February 15-May 12, 1996), and the Hayward Gallery, London (June 6-August 19, 1996).

Publication

A comprehensive, 592-page catalogue accompanies the exhibition, featuring 563 illustrations, selected writings by Oldenburg from his notes and other published sources, as well as essays by Germano Celant; Mark Rosenthal, Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, National Gallery of Art; Marla Prather, Associate Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, National Gallery of Art; and Dieter Koepplin, Head of Prints and Drawings, Kunstmuseum Basel. The catalogue is available in the Guggenheim's Museum Stores for $49.95 (softcover) and $75.00 (hardcover). The hardcover catalogue is also being distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

In addition, an deluxe hardcover edition of the catalogue is available, with a signed and numbered 8 1/4 x 11" lithograph executed by the artist especially for the Guggenheim exhibition. The edition, which is limited to 250 and enclosed in a clothbound slipcase, is available for $500.00.

The artist will be present for a public booksigning of the catalogue at the Guggenheim Museum on October 15 from 2:00-4:00 p.m.

Educational Programs

Public Tours

A new series of thematic tours will be offered throughout Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology. Reservations are not required, and tours are free with museum admission. The schedule is as follows:

Mondays: 4:00 p.m. Art & Artifice ‹ Explore the issues of reality and the representations of the everyday world in the art of Claes Oldenburg. (Adults and Children)

Tuesdays: 12:00 p.m. Exhibition Highlights (Adults and Children) 2:00 p.m. Outrageous Objects ‹ A huge clothespin? A giant button? A life-size lipstick? Discover the world of Claes Oldenburg through his unique, monumentalized sculptures of familiar objects. (Adults and Children)

4:00 p.m. Food For Thought ‹ An ice cream cone, a hamburger, a giant BLT. Begin an in-depth look into the mind of the artist through a study of his fascination with food as a subject for his artwork. (Adults and Children)

Wednesdays: 12:00 p.m. Exhibition Highlights

2:00 p.m. Objects of Desire ‹ Discover how Oldenburg's objects project human-like qualities evoking emotions and sensuality. (Adults)

4:00 p.m. Food for Thought

Fridays: 12:00 p.m. Exhibition Highlights

2:00 p.m. Objects of Desire

Saturdays & Sundays: 12:00 p.m. In the Land of Giants and Dwarves ‹ This special tour explores Oldenburg's work through the use of stories. The tour will focus on how familiar, everyday objects can become something very different when size and scale are changed. (Adults and Children)

2:00 p.m. Exhibition Highlights

Family Self-Guided Tour Sheet

What is a giant piece of cake doing in the museum? Why is that drum set so soft? Children and adults can discover the answers to these questions together as they explore the exhibition with the help of a newly designed family self-guided tour sheet. The guide, which includes questions and activities, is meant to provoke discussion among visitors of all ages, and will be offered free with admission.

Learning Through Art Family Days

Families will have the opportunity to share an in-depth look at Oldenburg's life-long work during Learning Through Art Family Days, sponsored by NYNEX and The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Challenge Initiative. The program will be offered to children in the Learning Through Art program on Wednesdays, and, for the first time, to the public on four Sundays: October 15, November 19, December 10, and January 14 from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Tour participants will work with a teaching artist and tap into their own imaginations when they create a project inspired by Oldenburg's work. Children and their families will also enjoy a light snack and receive an activity book with take-home projects. The program is offered at $20.00 per child; $10.00 for members. Enrollment is limited to 20 children per workshop; reservations can be made by calling 212/423-3534.

Claes Oldenburg Tour and Dinner

In celebration of Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology, visitors to the Guggenheim Museum are invited to enjoy a distinctive and complete evening out on Sundays, October 8, November 12, December 10, and January 14 beginning at 5:00 p.m. The evening Tour & Dinner package begins with a one-hour, guided tour of the exhibition, followed by a light dinner served in the museum's café, which is operated by Dean & DeLuca. The per-person price for the entire evening is just $30.00, or $25.00 for members. Program benefits also include a discount on membership and 10% off on purchases in the Guggenheim Museum Store. Reservations are required and can be made by calling 212/423-3664, Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. or by stopping by the Membership Desk at the Guggenheim Museum. For group reservations, contact Tour and Group Services at 212/423-3652 or 212/423-3555.

Works and Process Presents Homage to the Swedish Ballet

During Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology, Works and Process at the Guggenheim is pleased to present new choreography by acclaimed dancer and choreographer Murray Louis. Homage to the Swedish Ballet, which was inspired by the work of the Swedish Ballet in Paris during the early 1920s, will be held on October 9 and 10 at 8:00 p.m. at the John Jay College Theater, 899 Tenth Avenue (at 58th Street), New York City. A conversation between the choreographer and Bengt Hager, founder of the Stockholm Dance Museum, will precede the performance. Tickets are available by advance sale and can be purchased at the Guggenheim Museum or by phone at 212/423-3575.

David Sanborn Concert at the Guggenheim

On October 24, Elektra Entertainment and CD101.9 present David Sanborn in concert at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The Grammy award-winning saxophonist will perform with his jazz quartet, and Assistant Curator Clare Bell will speak about Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology and the artist's use of musical instruments as subject matter. CD101.9 will distribute free concert tickets to radio listeners; for further information, please call the CD101.9 Entertainment Line at 212/949-1019.

More Food for Thought

During museum hours throughout the exhibition, the Aye Simon Reading Room will be converted into a place for quiet contemplation, where visitors can explore catalogues, books, and other printed materials that discuss Oldenburg's life and work.

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