Archives des News

Born in Stockholm, Sweden, Oldenburg came to the U.S at a young age when his father was appointed as General Consul of Sweden in Chicago. He studied at Yale University and first started a career as a journalist until he decided to attend in 1952 the Art Institute of Chicago.

He then delivered drawings to several magazines and was probably the first “Pop” artist who really produced comics books images before integrating them in his artistic vocabulary.

He started to exhibit his first paintings during the mid fifties and settled in 1956 in New York and lived through odd jobs that put him with direct contact with street life there before meeting a group of artists, notably Allan Kaprow, the theorist and inventor of the “happening”, Red Grooms, Lucas Samaras, George Segal and Robert Whitman who all expressed their preference for happenings and environment.

Oldenburg then took part in many happenings organised by that group and created in 1958 the “drawing-objects”, which were closely associated with assemblages, an inheritance of the Dada movement.

In 1960 he took part with Jim Dine in an exhibition based on environment showing a house theme. He then exhibited in his studio “The Shop” and in 1962 produced giant objects, sometime made by his wife Pat, which were in direct relation with daily reality.

His monumental objects referring to usual consuming products earned him from art critic Pierre Restany the nickname of “Michelangelo of Pop Art”. He notably conceived a giant banana that was to be displayed in Time Square as well as a giant toilet sink destined to float on the River Thames or a giant lipstick tube that was erected in the courtyard of Yale University in 1969.

Oldenburg soon became famous around the entire world thanks to his “monument-drawings” made in plaster or plastic such as his giant ice-creams hamburgers, pork-chops or cakes.

The consecration of American Pop Art occurred in 1962 via an exhibition entitled “New Realists” held in New York, which gathered U.S and European artists but it must be remembered that Pop Art originated from Britain, where the “Independent Group” had already started to investigate such form of art as soon as in 1952 before taking part four years later in an exhibition called “This is tomorrow”. The group notably showed giant portraits of Marilyn Monroe or giant pictures of beer bottles.

In the U.S, the Pasadena Museum was the first to organise in 1962 an exhibition devoted to Pop Art called “New paintings of common objects” and the following year exhibitions of this kind multiplied in American galleries and museums.

In 1969, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a major exhibition of Oldenburg's works, one year before the Tate Gallery in London.

Oldenburg said there were several manners to approach an object as well as to eat, touch, caress, seat or hold and added that he had tried in his work to combine all these physical gestures or feelings though he did not deny that there was also some hints of a game or a caricature of our society.