Remembering Claes Oldenburg: He created playful and monumental art out of everyday objects.

Claes Oldenburg:
Giant Shuttlecocks, Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, Kansas City, Mo.

I was saddened to learn of the recent death of Claes Oldenburg, the Swedish-born American sculptor, who delighted in creating large replicas of everyday objects. They were designed to be playful and monumental, and yes, they are all gigantic in stature and attention grabbers.

The 93-year-old Oldenburg’s public art installations include: a diaper pin, badminton shuttlecocks, a spoon and cherry, a clothespin, an ice cream cone, even an old-fashioned typewriter eraser. These visual art works and others just as playful and monumental created by Oldenburg dot the urban landscapes of many major U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Kansas City, Minneapolis and Seattle.

It wasn’t until I caught a glimpse of Corridor Pin, Blue in 2013, during a visit to the de Young Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, that I realized I had seen many of Oldenburg’s public art installations during my U.S. travels this millennium.

I’ve seen the Giant Shuttlecocks on the pristine front lawn of the Nelson-Atkinson Museum of Art in Kansas City, the Spoonbridge and Cherry that highlights the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden at the Walker Art Center, and the Typewriter Eraser, Scale X at the Olympic Sculpture Garden in Seattle. Since moving east, I’ve also seen another version of Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser, Scale X at the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., too.

Among other Oldenburg sculptures, Chicago, where the artist grew up, has an Oldenburg baseball bat and there’s a fruit bowl in Miami. Meanwhile, Cleveland has a giant stamp, and Las Vegas is home to a flashlight. In Philadelphia, there’s a 45-foot-high clothespin that is displayed across the street from City Hall.

Lo and behold, San Francisco is home to not only the giant diaper pin sculpture. It is also where Cupid’s Span, a 60-foot-high painted fiberglass and stainless-steel sculpture created by Oldenburg and Coojse Van Brugge, his wife and collaborator of more than a quarter of a century, dropped anchor and took up residence along the Embarcadero waterfront in 2002. It certainly changed the look and landscape when it premiered.

I’ve walked by and admired Cupid’s Span numerous times over the years, when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, and photographed it from many different angles. Each time, it seemed, there’s something different about it. Once, I was lucky enough to capture the bow and area while it was covered in fog.

On the occasion of the unveiling of Cupid’s Span, Oldenburg told the San Francisco Chronicle: 

“At first there’s the man-in-the-street opinion, but then there’s the more nuanced response. 

“We don’t copy the objects we use, we try to transform them and we hope they go on transforming as you look at them. The idea of endless public dialogue – visual dialogue – is very important to us.”

In remembering Oldenburg, who died Monday at his Manhattan home, The New York Times wrote that the artist “revolutionized our idea what a public monument could be. In lieu of bronze sculptures of men on horseback, or long-forgotten patriots standing on a pedestal, hand over heart, orating through the ages, Oldenburg filled our civic spaces with nostalgia-soaked objects inflated to absurdist proportions. It is interesting that so many of his subject are culled from the realm of the home and traditional female pursuits. His sculpture of a lipstick case or a garden spade, his ‘Clothespin’ or nearby it, his ‘Split Button’ sculpture (a beloved meeting place at the University of Pennsylvania) – all are based on the type of objects that could be found at the bottom of our mother’s purses.”

Whether or not Oldenburg had a social agenda behind his public art installations didn’t matter to me. I found his Pop Art both visually colorful and admiring. And, as Oldenburg once explained to former San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker: “Just the fact that you can put up something beautiful and complex in a city is a social statement to itself.”

All photographs: © Michael Dickens. 

Thoughts on David Hockney’s “The Queen’s Window” – A country scene to honor a lover of the countryside

Last week, Westminster Abbey commemorated the 65th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth’s reign with a dedication ceremony of “The Queen’s Window,” created by British pop art icon David Hockney. Measuring 28 feet by 12 feet, “The Queen’s Window” represents what the New York Times described as “a hawthorn, a thorny floral shrub, blooming in a joyous profusion of reds, blues, greens and yellows.”

In a video interview posted by the Abbey, Hockney said of the newly revealed window, “It’s celebratory.” He revealed that he crafted the trees to look as though “Champagne had been poured over bushes.”

What is remarkable is that Hockney reworked the design for the Abbey window from an earlier painting using a iPad, which has become one of his favorite tools for creating art in recent years. At age 81, he’s been known to use new technology quite extensively – such as cameras, photo copiers and fax machines – throughout his remarkable and colorful career. It has liberated Hockney as an artist and set him apart from others who rely solely on the use of traditional materials.

“For many years, I pondered how we should celebrate The Queen’s reign in the Abbey,” the Very Rev. Dr. John Hall, dean of the church, said, during the dedication of “The Queen’s Window” on Oct. 2, inside London’s Westminster Abbey. “A statue seemed wrong, though there are many from earlier centuries. We already have a portrait of Her Majesty in the Diamond Jubilee Galleries. A stained glass window seemed the obvious thing, and a great window was available, a double lancet surmounted by a circular oculus containing sexfoil tracery, on the west side of the North Transept, the only window there without stained glass.”

Hockney, whom I learned had never before designed stained glass, came to see the window and the next day sent Hall a draft design. The dean responded to Hockney in kind: “As I wished not herald or representational, but a country scene to honor someone we know to be a lover of the countryside, a design evocative of his work in East Yorkshire.”

As the “most celebrated living artist,” in the words of Hall, Hockney seemed a natural fit for creating “The Queen’s Window.” After all, his fame coincided with the queen’s reign. The dean has called Hockney’s work, “absolutely vibrant.” He was quoted by the New York Times as saying: “It’s very legible, so in that sense it’s very accessible, and I think people will be very excited by it.”

Hockney collaborated on “The Queen’s Window” with stained glass experts at Barley Studio in northern England. He’s happy with the final outcome.

Said Hockney: “I think it’s looking marvelous!”

Photograph: Courtesy of Google Images. 
Videos: Courtesy of Westminster Abbey.