Claes Oldenburg was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1929, but he spent the majority of his early life in Chicago, where his parents moved in 1936. From 1946 to 1950 he studied art and literature at Yale, returning to Chicago in 1950 to work as an intern reporter. He attended classes at the Art Institute of Chicago on and off from 1952 until 1954, and in 1955 he worked as an illustrator. He moved to New York in 1956 and began to associate with a group of artists who were using recognizable forms to challenge the work of the Abstract Expressionists and who used installations, theater productions, and performance art pieces called “happenings” in place of traditional painting and sculpture.
In 1959, Oldenburg had his first one-man show at the Judson Gallery on Washington Square. He then began using representational art to express his own personal experience with his environment. This led to the installation of The Street in which he staged his first “happening”, Snapshots from the City. His creation of canvas props at these installations led to his exploration of the large scale sculptures for which he is known. He began to envision outdoor monuments, making scale models such as Giant Soft Fan, Ghost Version. He was soon able to produce the fullscale version and continued to create public art almost exclusively thereafter. In 1976 he began collaborations with art historian and writer Coosje van Bruggen, whom he married a few years later. Their monumental sculptures can be found in many major cities across the United States and Europe. By making art for the public on such a grand scale, Oldenburg creates democratic art for contemporary society.
Oldenburg uses familiar objects, often placing them in an unfamiliar context by changing their size, material, and environment. Giant Soft Fan, Ghost Version is a large-scale model of a sculpture he envisioned in 1967 of a huge fan on Bedloes Island in place of the Statue of Liberty. His idea came from a combination of thoughts: the visual similarities between the statue’s crown and a fan, the size and shape of Statue of Liberty souvenirs, and the need for a cool breeze on Long Island. He created two large-scale models of the fan, allowing him to experiment with issues of mass, perception, and function using quotidian objects. The two fans, one of shiny black vinyl (Giant Soft Fan, now at the Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the other of white canvas, both have the form of a fan, but are made from soft materials that droop and sag when suspended from the ceiling. Oldenburg’s fascination with the effect of gravity on form is evident. His subjects are not simply the objects that he portrays, but his own and his viewer’s understanding and experience of these objects.
Oldenburg’s sculpture is exciting in the novelty of the materials and subject matter, and he continuously takes into account setting and audience in order to make his sculptures relevant. His use of canvas gives the fan a soft, dry, almost pillow-like appearance, especially when juxtaposed with the shiny black vinyl of the New York version. Oldenburg stated: “I have a shiny black fan and a dry white fan— like two angels, those winged victories that walk beside you, the white angel and the black angel. One for day, one for night; turn to the left, turn to the right. If people want to find things, they are probably there.”
