Across The Margin / ATM Publishing presents Chapter Six of Arthur Hoyle’s The Jealous Muse — Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen : Sharing The Muse…
Chapter Six — Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen : Sharing The Muse
In January 1970 a retrospective exhibition of the work of sculptor Claes Oldenburg traveled from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to the Stedilijk Museum in Amsterdam. Oldenburg accompanied the exhibition to oversee its installation, and there met Coosje van Bruggen, an assistant curator at the Stedilijk who had been assigned to edit the exhibition catalog. Van Bruggen held a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Groningen and was deeply versed in European culture and its literature. She was married, and the mother of two children.
The MOMA show that had traveled to Amsterdam and brought Oldenburg into contact with van Bruggen was an overview of his first ten years working as an artist in New York. He had come to New York from Chicago, where he had been employed variously as a newspaper reporter and as a commercial illustrator. A graduate of Yale University who had majored in literature and theater, he had also taken art classes in his senior year. While working in Chicago, he studied art at the city’s famed Art Institute. He drew and sketched and wrote frequently in his journals, recording both his impressions of the urban life around him and his own responses to it. His first show took place at Club St. Elmo restaurant on North State Street alongside the work of two other local artists, one of whom was Richard Indiana. The show presented drawings Oldenburg had made based on the short stories of Nelson Algren, a writer who dealt with the underbelly of American society.
When Oldenburg came to New York in 1956 to become a professional artist, he thought of himself as a painter working in a figurative tradition. Poor and without social or artistic contacts, he lived in a run-down neighborhood on Manhattan’s lower east side. He found part-time work in the library at Cooper Union Museum and Art School and read widely in the library’s collection of books on art history. In his spare time, he wandered the streets of the Bowery, sketching what he observed and making notes in his journal. He was absorbing the city.
In 1958 he met Allan Kaprow, a painter who was leading a revolt against the aesthetics of Abstract Expressionism. At the time that Oldenburg arrived in New York, Abstract Expressionism, as practiced by painters such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, was the prevailing art movement. It was favored by eminent art critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg, sold in upscale art galleries scattered throughout mid-town Manhattan, and bought by wealthy private collectors and museums. But its insularity in a time of growing concern among artists and writers over the widespread materialism of American society provoked a response. Abstract Expressionism was a non-representational art that had narrowed its interest to three simple elements: the canvas, paint, and the artist’s psychological and emotional states during the act of painting. The drip paintings of Pollock were the most notable examples of the style. His paintings are beautiful to behold because of their complex, random patterns of line and color and form that resulted from Pollock’s instinctive, unpremeditated, careless application of paint.
Kaprow wanted to bring painting back into the “real” world, the external world of objects and people. And he wanted to remove painting from the sacrosanct halls of fancy galleries and bourgeois museums supported by wealthy private collectors. But he also wanted to preserve the randomness, the element of chance, that operated in Abstract Expressionism. The result was “Happenings,” a form of theater created by painters, musicians, and writers who staged events involving people, objects, sounds, and lights thrown together helter-skelter, in the manner of a dream, creating surreal and dadaesque effects on the viewer—a three-dimensional Abstract Expressionism moving in time. They were staged in frumpy artist’s studios and seedy galleries on the lower east side, and sometimes in the streets. Though plotless and scriptless, they were choreographed and rehearsed before being offered to an audience. Performances might last only a few minutes, or as long as an hour and a half. The professed aim of the pieces was to upend audience expectations about art, to provoke and disturb entrenched sensibilities. Although they had small followings, Happenings did succeed in alarming the critics, who were largely appalled by the deliberate chaotic ugliness of the performances.
Oldenburg joined the party. In January 1960 his installation The Street was presented in the basement gallery of the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in Greenwich Village. The installation, described by a reviewer as “a chaotic accumulation of objects made of cardboard, wrapping paper, scraps of newspaper and fabric, bottles, and all sorts of debris,” (The Sixties, p. 31) captured Oldenburg’s experience of the urban landscape around him, including the art scene, in a style that he described as “objective expressionism.” He also referred to it as “a nightmare, my personal nightmare.” Oldenburg staged a Happening in The Street titled “Snapshots from the City,” in which he and his future wife Patty Muchinski performed. In May a second exhibit of The Street was presented at the Reuben Gallery, a bigger space that prompted Oldenburg to produce larger, free-standing objects that viewers could walk around. This exhibit marked Oldenburg’s transition from painter to sculptor. Although he would continue to draw, sketch, and paint throughout his career, and his two-dimensional art would continue to be sold in galleries and exhibited in museums, the work that he did on paper with pen and brush served as a preliminary step in realizing three-dimensional forms taken from everyday life—Pop Art.
The next step in Oldenburg’s artistic development was The Store, an exhibition of objects for sale in the artist’s studio at 107 East Second Street. Simultaneously a satire on both art galleries and department stores, The Store offered for sale objects Oldenburg made from muslin soaked in plaster, shaped over a chicken wire frame, then painted with enamel. Each object was unique, a kind of sad sack version of “real” objects that could be purchased in conventional stores or food outlets: cheeseburgers with everything, pastries, a piece of pie, clothing, lingerie, a can of 7-Up. The objects were “manufactured” and offered for sale under the auspices of the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company, a fictional entity that Oldenburg created based on the toy gun that had been merchandised from the Buck Rogers comic strip. In his notebooks, Oldenburg gave free rein to his fantasies about the Ray Gun and its powers, which he came to associate with his own creative source and potency. He collected hundreds of objects, some made, some found, that held the form of the Ray Gun, turning the object into a personal fetish. He made a sculpture of the Ray Gun that likened it to male genitals, with the barrel resembling a penis and the handle, testicles. The Ray Gun was also a theatrical impresario that staged Oldenburg’s Happenings.
When The Store moved to the larger Green Gallery in mid-town Manhattan, Oldenburg again increased the scale of the objects, making them out of sections of canvas stuffed with Styrofoam and sewn together by Patty, then painted. The art buying public got its first view of Oldenburg’s whimsical soft sculptures in the form of a “Giant Ice Cream Cone” and a “Floor-Cake” the size of a sofa. Although old-line critics were dismayed by Oldenburg’s cheesy vernacular, the public was enthused and started buying. Oldenburg, and Pop Art, had arrived.
The Store and the Ray Gun Manufacturing Company reveal Oldenburg’s child-like sensibility, his propensity to invent and inhabit imagined environments. Barbara Rose, an art historian and early interpreter of Oldenburg’s work, traced this tendency in his work to an elaborate childhood fantasy that he recorded in his notebooks. Rose was given access to the notebooks for the long essay she wrote for publication in the MOMA exhibition catalog. She found in them Oldenburg’s invention of a country called “Neubern” (newborn?) located in the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and South America. He created a full portrait of the country—its history, geography, sociology, economics, and science. He even made model airplanes to serve as an Air Force for Neubern, an early sign of his determination to actualize his fantasies. Oldenburg invented this imaginary world soon after his parents had settled in Chicago in 1936. His father Goesta was a Swedish consular official who had been appointed to run the consular office in Chicago. His mother Sigrid Elisabeth was a concert singer. Oldenburg had been born in Stockholm, and when his parents located in Chicago, the boy was seven years old and spoke no English. He felt himself to be an outsider and made himself at home in a fantasy world that he controlled. The Street, the Happenings, and The Store perpetuate this imaginative activity, as do the large-scale projects that lay ahead.
Oldenburg continued to think in terms of enlarging the scale of forms based on objects used in everyday life, divorcing them from their utilitarian function, and placing them in unexpected urban settings that would give them a surreal quality. In this he differed from other Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein who were directly copying mass-produced commercial art and displaying their work in conventional settings like galleries and museums. Oldenburg wanted to remove art from exclusive spaces trafficked primarily by an economic elite and make it part of the stream of everyday life. In this sense he was a populist artist as well as a Pop artist.
Following the success of his show at the Green Gallery, Oldenburg sought fresh stimulation and became a peripatetic artist for several years. He and Patty, who had married on Staten Island on April 13, 1960, moved to Venice, California in 1963 and rented a house on one of the small canals. He drew and sketched, produced Happenings, and began using vinyl as the covering for his soft sculptures, which were becoming larger, more colorful, and more humorous, as their titles alone indicate: “Giant Toothpaste Tube,” “Soft Pay Telephone,” “Giant Loaf of Raisin Bread.” In an interview, Oldenburg explained the impulse behind his soft sculptures. “My images derive from the American ambience . . . The soft sculptures are based on the structure of the human body, which is both hard and soft. Many of my sculptures have things inside them which can be felt through the surface like bones.” (Coplans, Art in America, p. 70) This statement is Oldenburg’s ironic admission that in these pieces he was attempting to humanize objects that had become so commodified through mass production that they had lost their magical properties as fetishes. He was trying to invest them with life. Barbara Rose argued that Oldenburg’s soft sculptures were a radical innovation that contradicted received notions of what constitutes sculpture—their hardness and fixed form. Instead, Oldenburg was creating “a yielding, vulnerable surface covering a loose, relaxed form subject to the force of gravity . . .” (Rose, MOMA, p. 136) Through these floppy forms, Oldenburg was seeking “an end to man’s alienation from his industrialized environment.” (Rose, MOMA, p. 139)
It was only logical that Oldenburg’s imagination would inflate his concepts for large sculptures to the scale of the urban environment itself. In 1965, briefly back in New York after traveling extensively in Europe, Oldenburg made the first in a series of “Proposed Colossal Monuments” that were meant as a commentary on the urban landscape. The proposals were deliberately unfeasible and dadesque: A melting Giant Good Humor Bar to replace the Pan Am building on Park Avenue in Manhattan, Giant Scissors where the Washington Monument stands, a Giant Fan substituted for the Statue of Liberty. He even went so far as to submit a drawing of a Giant Clothespin to an architecture competition for a skyscraper in Chicago. (Some years later, this project was actually carried out and placed in a civic plaza in Philadelphia.) Rose observed about these proposals, “The monuments were conceived as a satire on the banality of American life, the absurdity of the urban environment, and the irrelevance of the heroic monument to modern culture in general.” (Rose, MOMA, p. 103)
The first proposed monument to be realized was “Placid Civic Monument” in 1967. More a piece of performance art than a monument, it consisted of a group of city employees digging a grave in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then filling it in. Oldenburg, wearing a suit and tie that made him look like a museum official, supervised the gravediggers as they buried the concept of museum-housed art.
In 1969 Oldenburg received a commission to produce a monumental sculpture on the campus of his alma mater, Yale University. The commission was initiated by a Yale graduate student seeking to make a public statement about the Vietnam War. The student formed the Colossal Keepsake Corporation, a fundraising vehicle that solicited the money to pay for the commission. Oldenburg designed “Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Track,” a twenty-four-foot-high lipstick made from aluminum, steel, and wood, and topped with bright red vinyl. The piece was manufactured in North Haven, Connecticut by Lippincott, Inc., a metal fabricator that worked with artists, and installed on the Beinecke Plaza in front of a neo-classical building that commemorated Yale men killed in World War One. The sculpture resembled a tank with its turret pointed towards the sky, the red vinyl suggesting flame. It also resembled an erect penis whose tip was overly excited. The installation provoked controversy, and some Yale trustees and alumni unsuccessfully attempted to have the sculpture removed. Oldenburg received a great deal of free publicity because of the piece, and before long other commissions followed. Lipstick marked a turning point in Oldenburg’s development as an artist. In the year that he produced this sculpture he said, “The idea of an object as a magic thing no longer obsesses me as it once did . . . I became far more interested in the architectural form.” (Anthology, p. 482) It was at this stage in his career that he met Coosje van Bruggen.
In April 1970, a month after the exhibition at the Stedilijk closed, Oldenburg and Patty Muchinski divorced. His next encounter with van Bruggen occurred in June 1971 in the city of Arnhem, the Netherlands, where Oldenburg was participating in Sonsbeek ’71, a sculpture exhibition held periodically in a park. The exhibition was being curated by Wim Beeren, chief curator at the Stedilijk, and he assigned van Bruggen to co-edit the exhibition catalog. Oldenburg’s submission was a “Sculpture in the Form of a Trowel Stuck in the Ground,” a forty-two-foot-high silver shovel made of steel coated with zinc primer. (Was Oldenburg still thinking about the grave he had dug in Central Park?) Van Bruggen later recounted that she didn’t like the piece and regarded Oldenburg as the bearer of American cultural imperialism.
But he was smitten, and when in 1976 he was commissioned to rework the trowel for the grounds of the Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller in Otterlo, the Netherlands, she suggested that he change the color to the bright blue of Dutch workmen’s overalls and place the trowel in a garden surrounded by wild parkland. This was their first collaboration, and it set the pattern for their subsequent work together, in which van Bruggen often served as the conceptualizer who contributed cultural and historical context to the design process, while Oldenburg served as the artisan, the maker. “Though Coosje does not hand-make any of the models or drawings, she often defines the position or treatment of a subject,” Oldenburg later said. “In choice of subject, or in any detail, in form or color, there is no part of a large-scale project Coosje cannot determine, with my hand responsive to her words.” (Bottle of Notes, p. 14) This union of head and hand in their partnership indicates a fusion of opposites in a true artistic marriage.
By the time she and Oldenburg had reconnected in 1976, van Bruggen had left the Stedilijk to teach art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Enschede. She was divorced and living with her two young children in Deventer. Oldenburg joined her there in the spring of 1977 and set up a studio. They worked together on the design of the Mouse Museum, a large container shaped like the head of Mickey Mouse that would hold objects that Oldenburg had archived from The Street and The Store. Van Bruggen also collaborated with Oldenburg on his commission to produce a large-scale sculpture for the city of Munster, in Germany. Oldenburg and van Bruggen scouted potential sites for the sculpture, and information that she provided about the history of Munster helped to define the shape of the project. The result was the installation of three giant pool balls made of concrete on the lawn of Aaseeterrassen, a public park shaped like a pool table. The pool balls alluded both to the tradition of ballooning in Munster and to a cannonball that van Bruggen had noticed embedded in one of the city’s walls. The collaboration is a good example of how van Bruggen’s cultural awareness blended with Oldenburg’s fondness for metaphoric forms.
On July 22, 1977, while in Allegan, Michigan supervising construction of the Mouse Museum, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen were married. She moved to New York with her son Paulus and daughter Maartje and took up residence with her husband in two adjoining five-story warehouse buildings on Broome Street in lower Manhattan that Oldenburg had purchased in 1971 and converted into studio and living space.
Oldenburg was then working almost exclusively on large-scale projects that came to him in the form of commissions from cities, museums, and other institutions such as universities. He did no work for private collectors, although many of them bought the drawings and models of his large-scale works from his dealer, Arne Glimcher. After several proposals solicited by corporations were rejected in the drawing or model stage and never realized, Oldenburg and van Bruggen decided to forgo that market for their work. Oldenburg’s reputation and fame had spread internationally, so there was no shortage of commissions.
As she settled into Broome Street, van Bruggen began to inventory the objects that Oldenburg had been randomly collecting or saving from The Street and The Store and that were now scattered throughout the residence—his quarry. This was her way of getting completely in synch with him artistically. The inventory was prelude to making a selection for the Mouse Museum and its adjoining Ray Gun Wing. The items ran the gamut from a toothbrush, a golf club, a dish in the shape of a carrot, to souvenirs of the US capitol and the Iwo Jima flag raising, to miniature houses made from cardboard. The Ray Gun Wing, shaped like a pistol, would hold Oldenburg’s collection of ray guns, which ranged from slick plastic toys in various shapes, sizes, and colors, to plain objects that carried the F-shaped profile of a gun, anything from a bent nail or straw to a faucet. The museum and wing traveled as an installation from museum to museum in the U.S. and Europe over a period of several years. In this project, van Bruggen played the role of curator. She then wrote a history of Oldenburg’s work contained in the installation.
She also served as an advisor to Oldenburg on a commission he had received in 1975 from the General Services Administration to create a monument for a public space in front of the Harold Washington Social Security Center in Chicago. Drawing from the baseball fever of his native city, home of the Cubs and the White Sox, Oldenburg designed the ten-story Batcolumn, made from steel and aluminum in an open mesh pattern that made the bat hollow and translucent. Van Bruggen suggested the dark grey color that complemented but did not match the deep blue of the Center. The sculpture was manufactured by Lippincott and weighed twenty tons when completed. From small objects in his studio Oldenburg was now making epic statements, and van Bruggen joined him in the creative process by interpreting the grand scale of their urban contexts. Oldenburg noted after their collaboration was underway, “The whole idea of placing a piece in relation to its setting is Coosje’s idea more than mine . . . Now the large-scale projects grow out of observations of a particular place.” (Cochran, Arts & Antiques June 2007, p. 52)
Their first co-signed project was Flashlight, commissioned by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in November 1978. As was usual for commissions, Oldenburg and van Bruggen were given free rein to create a proposal. After studying the site—a small plaza between a concert hall and a theater—to determine scale and thematic elements, they decided on a monumental flashlight. This “stereotypical object” tied in with several features of the site: its proximity to the brilliantly lit Strip in Las Vegas, its resemblance to some species of cactus plants found on the desert, notably the saguaro, and its relevance to the adjoining columned neoclassical building where ushers used flashlights to seat people. The flashlight as a subject for a monumental sculpture had been on Oldenburg’s mind since 1968 when he sketched “Flashlight Across the Hollywood Hills,” one of his fantasies.
Oldenburg built two model versions of the sculpture before he and van Bruggen and the client were fully satisfied. The piece was then constructed at Lippincott at a cost of $105,000, transported to the campus, and installed in March 1981. In its finished form Flashlight was thirty-six feet six inches high, eleven feet wide at its widest, seven feet ten inches wide at its narrowest, and weighed thirty-seven tons. Twenty-four fluorescent lamps were placed in an eighteen-inch wide well surrounding its base. It was van Bruggen’s idea to turn the flashlight upside down. At night, Flashlight glowed eerily and mysteriously, reminiscent of the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Initially controversial among some members of the university community who were startled by its architectural dominance, Flashlight has become an icon not only of the campus, but of the city. Tour buses regularly make a stop at the plaza so visitors can view it.
Three months later, another project that had been commissioned in 1978, Split Button, was installed on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Oldenburg wrote an account of Split Button’s evolution that reveals the playful and imaginative process by which he and van Bruggen worked together.
Coosje proposed a large button lying on the ground, similar to one she had seen in a drawing I did in 1972. She felt that the subject would harmonize with the landscape and contained an ideal of form in an everyday object to which students could respond . . . In its broken form, as Coosje saw it, the button represented an object of the least value, the most discarded object one could imagine, as in the remains of a student’s shirt button broken in the laundry . . . The choice of color for the button was white, not only to match the color of a typical shirt, but to establish a constructivist scheme with two other sculptures in the park . . . (Claes Oldenburg Coosje van Bruggen, ed. by Germano Celant, pp. 205-206)
In preparing a cardboard study for the sculpture, Oldenburg and van Bruggen discovered, by accident, that folding the button along a crease created a work of art. “Split but not totally disconnected, the button could rise, presenting itself as a sculpture . . . Seen from above and somewhat diminished, we can imagine it having blown off the coat of the colossal statue of William Penn by Alexander Milne Calder atop City Hall.” (Ibid, p. 206) Students now use it as a bench to sit on while they study or sun themselves.
Commissions flowed into the couple’s Broome Street Studio in a steady stream, like customers coming into The Store to buy Oldenburg’s fantasies, only now they were van Bruggen’s fantasies as well, and the merchandise was much larger (and more expensive). Their projects became more whimsical, more complex, looser. It was clear that they were having fun with art, and people wanted to share in the humor. The City of Salinas, California, requested a “large abstract sculptural work” for its Community Center, a park on the outskirts of town that adjoined a rodeo grounds. After visiting the site with Oldenburg, van Bruggen suggested “something blowing in the wind . . .Or something thrown.” (Large Scale Projects, p. 65) As an example, she referred to a drawing Oldenburg had made in 1974 of a fedora hat blowing down a sidewalk. The result of their conceptualizing was Hat in Three Stages of Landing, a sequential sculpture of three identical western-style hats, representing a single hat blown from the head of a rodeo spectator. The hat was shown in three stages of descent, the third being the landing on the grass. The two “flying” hats supported by stanchions were large enough to provide shade for park visitors, as an actual western hat does for its wearer. The hats were made of aluminum and steel painted yellow with polyurethane enamel. They were installed in March 1982.
The University of Hartford in Connecticut solicited a proposal in 1980. After a site visit, Coosje envisioned a piece based on her husband’s toothbrush, which rested downward in a cup on their bathroom sink. She found in this image similarities to the forms of cubism and constructivism that were two of her favorite areas of study. Oldenburg noted, “From the start the subject was associated with Coosje’s viewpoint.” (Bottle of Notes, p. 148) The sculpture was composed as a group of objects—the toothbrush, the paste, the cup, the sink—clustered together to make a single piece. A vertical slice, also Coosje’s idea, produced a cross-section view that gave the piece its full title: Cross-Section of a Toothbrush with Paste, in a Cup, on a Sink: Portrait of Coosje’s Thinking. Oldenburg’s explanation of the allusiveness contained in the sculpture makes explicit the expressiveness of their work—how they viewed inanimate objects as holding human attributes.
The sculpture [in its allusions to cubism and constructivism] reflected Coosje’s profession of art historian. The colour scheme was reminiscent of the Dutch flag (she was born in Groningen), and also reminded me of the red sweater and blue jeans I had often seen her wear when we lived in Deventer in an earlier period. Moreover, the sculpture seemed to suggest Coosje’s physique, an association she confirmed, commenting that like her body the sculpture was “bony, with little soft parts.” (Bottle of Notes, p. 151)
In November 1980 Oldenburg and van Bruggen presented a model of the work to university officials, including the President, who supported it. But in March 1981 the Board of Regents rejected the sculpture by a 3-2 vote. It later found a home in Krefeld, Germany on the grounds of the Haus Esters, a residence built in the late 1920s by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and subsequently converted into a museum for contemporary art. The finished piece, made of steel, reached a height of twenty feet. The toothbrush handle was painted blue, the brushes white, the paste pink, the “rubber” tip a dark red that matched the color of the cup. The sink was painted blue green. The geometric form of the piece—the cross-sectioning thinned it to the shape of a sundial—blended very well with the clean modern lines of van der Rohe’s building.
In 1983 van Bruggen and Oldenburg began a professional collaboration with the architect Frank Gehry that spanned several years and three projects. The couple had visited Gehry in January 1982 at his home in Santa Monica, California. Over the summer, van Bruggen and Gehry both served on the selection committee for Documenta 7, an exhibition of modern art in Kassel, Germany that exhibited Oldenburg’s work. Later that year, in November, Gehry and his wife Berta repaid the visit at the Broome Street Studio in New York. In August 1983 van Bruggen and Oldenburg visited Gehry’s offices in Venice, California, and were shown the model of Gehry’s plans for the Loyola University Law School campus in downtown Los Angeles. Out of that meeting came their first collaboration, triggered by an off-hand remark that Gehry made about an architectural feature of his plan whose cold perfection he wanted to disturb. The feature was four perfectly shaped cylindrical columns placed on a platform outside one of the campus buildings. Improvising, Oldenburg made a model of a workman’s ladder from stray materials he found in Gehry’s office. The ladder was perched precariously on one leg. A can of paint that had been placed on the top step was falling, spilling its contents. Thus was born Toppling Ladder with Spilling Paint. In 1985, Gehry obtained funding for the sculpture from a private donor, enabling van Bruggen and Oldenburg to carry out the project. A fourteen-foot-high ladder made of steel and aluminum was placed on the ground adjoining the four columns. This image of arrested motion suggested a larger, geologic, disturbance common in Los Angeles—an earthquake.
Given the sculptural quality of Gehry’s architecture, and the architectural quality of van Bruggen’s and Oldenburg’s large-scale public projects, it is not surprising that their collaboration continued. In March 1984 the Italian art critic Germano Celant arranged a one-week workshop on architecture and art, to be conducted by Oldenburg, van Bruggen, and Gehry, at the Polytechnic University of Milan. The workshop led to a proposal for a piece of performance art combining architecture, sculpture, and theater to be presented in Venice, Italy. Van Bruggen suggested a Swiss Army knife as the unifying element, as it carried architectural shapes when opened, and had the utilitarian function of “cutting” that had applications for the methods of the architect. The artistic dimension was added by Oldenburg, who transformed the knife’s shape into a galley with oars protruding from its sides. The galley would float on the water next to the dock of an abandoned naval yard in Venice known as the Arsenale. Van Bruggen regarded the piece as a coupling of their joint large-scale projects and Oldenburg’s 1960s Happenings.
The workshop participants and teachers from the university went to Venice with Oldenburg, van Bruggen, Gehry, and Celant to study the site for the performance. Van Bruggen wrote a scenario for the piece that featured three main characters: Dr. Coltello (the knife, played by Oldenburg), described by van Bruggen as “a connoisseur of hedonistic flotsam, aware of his weakness for accumulating collectibles”; Frankie P. Toronto, “a barber from Venice, California,” played by Gehry; and Georgia Sandbag (van Bruggen), “a former travel agent—now exploring the sweet life on her own.” (Anthology, p. 418, 420, 422). The students fashioned costumes and props to flesh out the surrealism of van Bruggen’s vision. Celant made the necessary arrangements with Venetian officials, and in September 1985 Il Corso del Coltello (“The Course of the Knife”), with a supporting cast drawn from the students and Gehry’s family, was presented before a crowd of bewildered but amused onlookers. Oldenburg’s Knife Ship, forty feet long made of wood, steel, and aluminum, its blades and corkscrew upraised, floated in the lagoon next to the Campo dell’ Arsenale. Subsequently, the Knife Ship was exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (1986) and then at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1987).
A third collaboration began in January 1986 as Gehry was working on plans to build a headquarters in Venice, California for the Chiat/Day advertising agency. As he studied the model for the building, he decided he wanted to add a sculptural element to it. In his office was the maquette of a pair of binoculars that had been made for Il Corso del Coltello but never used. He placed the maquette on the model and then called Oldenburg. In May, Oldenburg and van Bruggen came to Gehry’s office and agreed that the binoculars could be integrated into the design of the building as a functional architectural feature. “The binoculars were conceived as a set of two identical rooms connected to a larger conference room in the main building,” they wrote. (COCvB, ed. Celant, p. 316) Jay Chiat approved the concept and in 1991 the building, centered around the binoculars as the dominant visual feature, was completed.
Toppling Ladder was not the couple’s first large-scale sculpture that played with the force of gravity by presenting a precarious equilibrium among its parts. Oldenburg and van Bruggen over the course of their thirty-year collaboration created a number of large-scale projects that represented actual or imminent movement. During an interview he gave in 2009 shortly after his wife’s death, Oldenburg credited her as the impetus behind these works. “I tended to make sculpture symmetrical and static but she favored objects in movement. She would say, ‘This is too boring’, and preferred things that moved.” (Richard Cork. “It Was Good to Have an Opposite.” Financial Times (London) August 29, 2009, p.11.)
In 1981, Rolf Fehlbaum, the owner of Vitra, a German manufacturer of contemporary furniture, commissioned Oldenburg and van Bruggen to create a large sculpture as a gift for his father’s seventieth birthday. This was the couple’s first private commission. Their initial thought was a giant tack based on a model Oldenburg had made in 1978. But Fehlbaum rejected this idea. Van Bruggen then suggested “tool gate,” a portal made from balancing carpenter’s tools—screwdriver, hammer, pliers—that are used in the manufacture of furniture. Experimental arrangements of the three tools were made with models in a search for the right equilibrium. They ultimately were positioned with the screwdriver and pliers serving as supports for the hammer, placed horizontally across the top. The piece, like Toppling Ladder with Spilling Paint, seems precariously balanced.
Although Frank Gehry did not collaborate with Oldenburg and van Bruggen on the sculpture, he played an important role in its siting. Gehry was with the couple when they visited the site in April 1984 after the architectural workshop in Milan. Gehry was subsequently commissioned by Fehlbaum to create a museum devoted to chairs on the factory grounds. After the museum opened in 1988, Balancing Tools was relocated to serve as its gateway. For Oldenburg and van Bruggen, the sculpture signified more than a gateway. “The arch—not triumphal, but vulnerably wobbly—might also appear as a passage from one period of life to another. Tilted and turning at the very edge of control, the dynamic relation of the three components of the work suggested an acrobatic act as well, such as a chair balanced at the end of a stick . . . The grouping could also be seen as a dance. We thought of the annual spring ritual in Basel in which symbolic representations of the city’s workmen’s guilds—the Wild Man, the Gryphon, the Lion—dance together on a bridge over the Rhine . . .” (Co CvB ed Celant, p. 296)
Shortly after their return from Europe in 1984, van Bruggen and Oldenburg received a commission from the Metro-Dade County Art in Public Places program to create a fountain for a civic plaza in Miami. The couple traveled to Miami in November to study the site, and found it surrounded by a jumble of clunky architectural forms. Van Bruggen thought that a sculpture comprised of numerous parts scattered in apparent randomness about a central fountain would unify the setting. Inspired by the proximity of Miami’s famed Orange Bowl, the couple proposed “a broken bowl with fragments and contents strewn about it . . . The bowl began to be imagined as having dropped into the plaza, spilling its contents of [orange] slices and peels.” (CO CvB. Ed Celant, p. 338)
Preparation and fabrication of the parts at Lippincott took more than four years. The fountain consisted of four pools of water, one large and three smaller, designed to look like a splash, repeating the theme of randomness. There were three jets in the large pool, one each in the smaller pools. The motors for the jets ran on timers set to accentuate randomness. The sculpture, made of reinforced concrete, steel, fiberglass-reinforced plastic, and stainless steel consisted of seventeen separate parts—eight bowl fragments, four peels, five orange sections. Each peel weighed 7,500 pounds. To give the effect of a random moment frozen in time, some of the peels and slices lay on the ground next to the fragments of the bowl, while others were raised above the fountain on stanchions.
Van Bruggen and Oldenburg explained how the sculpture captured their impressions of the city of Miami. “The primary effect of randomness, a variety of forms and colors shifting in space and time, suits, in our view, the city of Miami. Miami is not whole, neither in its opposing architectures nor in the composition of its varied and clashing population. It is a city in process . . .” (CO CvB. Ed. Celant, p. 338)
One of the couple’s most astonishing pieces is Flying Pins, commissioned in 1998 by the city of Eindhoven in the Netherlands in anticipation of hosting the 2000 World Cup. The city asked for something “eye-catching,” and Oldenburg and van Bruggen happily complied. The site they chose was the grassy median of the Kennedylaan, the main boulevard leading into the city center. The location, which faces a busy intersection, pulses with civic energy. They saw in the form of the median between two lanes of traffic a bowling alley bordered by gutters. The Dutch word “laan” (lane) enriched this metaphor. Bowling “fit the location because the movement of inbound vehicles on the Kennedylaan could be equated with the imagined roll of a ball in a bowling lane.” (Sculpture By The Way, p. 168)
The sculpture freezes the moment just after impact, the twenty-four-foot-high pins scattering in all directions. The black ball, with its three finger holes, is partially submerged in the ground. The pins fly up at odd angles. Some have landed precariously on the ground. Others are in flight in clusters of two and three pins, balanced haphazardly. The piece combines visual elements of both Toppling Ladder and Dropped Bowl through its play on randomness and its defiance of the forces of gravity.
One of the couple’s most whimsical sculptures is Floating Peel, a thirteen-foot-high banana peel produced in three editions in 2002. The piece was made from fiber-reinforced plastic painted in two shades of yellow with polyester gelcoat. Four strips of the skin have been peeled back from the fruit, a small piece of which remains uneaten. The sculpture is balanced delicately on one peel. The other three strips float in the air, visually suggesting several metaphors: the blades of a fan, the petals of a flower, the arms and legs of a dancer in motion. Floating Peel is nearly unique in being based on a purely natural form, although altered by the human hand that peeled the banana. The utter banality of the piece, its transience, its humorous allusions to English vernacular, its visual metaphors, make it perhaps the ultimate expression of Pop Art.
Not all of their public monuments worked aesthetically, either as forms or as enhancements to the setting. In 1999 they were asked to create a monument on the Piazza San Marco in Venice for an exhibition of their work to be held in the Museo Correr, which occupies a former palace. They were seeking to design a piece that would contrast with the repetitive columnar architecture of the square. Their solution was the tail of a lion, symbol of the city. The tail was constructed from hollow curving sections of aluminum painted yellow. The tail ended in a brush-like cluster of brown canvas strips, to give the effect of the bushy tuft at the end of the tail. The piece protruded from a second-floor window, dangled over a balcony, and hung down in front of an archway opening into the building, leading the viewer to suppose that the lion’s body was inside the museum. Unfortunately, the visual association produced by this image was not a lion’s tail, but rather a section of plumbing pipe discharging waste onto the piazza. The British critic Craig Raine, in Venice to review the exhibition, roasted the installation in the following description:
From an upstairs window a yellow plastic rubbish-chute protrudes . . . From it hangs a dark brown torrent of arrested dirt . . . As I neared the installation, I realized that the apparent chain of buckets was not in fact telescopic. Their configuration was much more a segmented length of flexible pipe—a sewage outlet. So I stood underneath pondering the feathered suspension of liquid shit. It swayed in the breeze like a layer-cut wig, or black and brown strips of seaweed, with its coiffure faintly suggestive of Henry V . . . It was only the cover of the catalog which altered me to my misprision [sic]. (Craig Raine. “From Palladio to Blueberry Pie.” Modern Painters (Autumn 1999), v. 12, issue 3, p. 66)
His contempt for the piece leads Raine to wonder, “How much of their work is any good? How much is shit?” He goes on to denigrate van Bruggen’s role in the artistic partnership, consigning her to the status of helper. “He, after all, is the artist, not she, ” Raine grandly proclaims. The meanness of Raine’s review, its snobbish tone and smug sense of superiority, exemplifies the highbrow attitude towards art that Oldenburg, from his earliest days as an artist collecting detritus for The Street, rebelled against. Pop Art did not please everyone.
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In 1995 Oldenburg and van Bruggen were commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture to create a large-scale sculpture for a new park planned for a site on the outskirts of Paris. While traveling through the French countryside on their way to factories that were fabricating the resultant sculpture (Buried Bicycle, based on Samuel Beckett’s anti-hero Molloy, who falls from his bicycle into a ditch), van Bruggen was stirred by childhood memories of time spent in France. She persuaded her husband that they should acquire a second residence there. In 1992 the couple purchased Château de la Borde, an eighteenth-century castle located in Beaumont-sur-Dême in the Loire Valley. The castle had once been the home of Gustave Auguste de Beaumont, a life-long friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, who accompanied de Tocqueville on his tour of America. Subsequently, de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America while staying at the chateau. The literary lineage of the castle held strong appeal for van Bruggen, who had studied French literature and culture at the University of Groningen.
The couple spent several months of the year at the estate, using it as a retreat where they could enjoy solitude, reflect, and work on plans from their commissions. They converted the stables into a studio where Oldenburg could sketch and draw, and the two of them could work on models. They undertook restoration of the house and grounds and used both interior and exterior as settings for their work. They turned the castle’s salon into a music room where they displayed soft sculptures of musical instruments—a sagging viola, an unwound French horn, a trumpet tied in knots, a Stradivarius violin sliced in two pieces, a metronome made from canvas, wood, and hardware. They placed large-scale sculptures on the park-like grounds—a giant slice of blueberry pie a la mode resting on a stanchion, an enormous unfastened safety pin, standing on its head, reminiscent of the ray gun, a giant plantoir similar to Trowel 1, the piece that brought them together.
Van Bruggen believed that the chateau broadened their horizons as artists by encouraging them to think of their projects in terms of man’s relationship to nature as well as to the urban landscape that is the setting for so much of their work.
Until we began to spend time in Beaumont-sur-Dême, we worked mainly within cityscapes, with architectonic structures, such as skyscrapers, bridges, ferry boats, water towers, chimneys, and the like. In harmony with the overgrown and neglected park at the Château de la Borde, our inner resources were released into a more organic approach to sculpture. (Sculpture By The Way, p. 32)
Oldenburg sold the chateau in 2010, the year after his wife died from metastatic breast cancer. Their final project together was Tumbling Tacks, commissioned in 2009 by Kistefos-Museum in Jevnaker, Norway. Oldenburg wrote about this project on the couple’s website in a manner that suggests he thought of it as his wife’s burial ground.
Our final Large-Scale Project together was for a site in the Norwegian countryside, in a sculpture park called “Kistefors,” two hours by car north of Olso. The park is developed around the remains of a 19th century wood pulp factory, preserved by Christen Sveaas, the grandson of its proprietor, and filled with contemporary sculpture. When we were asked to make a sculpture for the collection, we responded in our usual way, not by providing an already existing work, but by visiting the place in order to determine a sculpture particular to the site.
Within the terrain, Coosje was drawn to a quiet hillside, which she saw as a backdrop for some colorful forms that first were thought of as giant flowers. Closer examination showed a wide path over the hill, lined with birches and nearly overgrown with lush greenery, that had once served to transport logs. Coosje reached into our image bank and brought forth not flowers, but a vision of four large industrially manufactured tacks tumbling down a hillside, each with its own distinct trajectory, yet all alike and propelled by the same force of gravity. The tacks appeared to her to signify the transition from the mechanical, repetitive reproduction found in the mill to a playful, free format, setting tacks loose to tumble like skiers down a hill, waving the circles and points of their poles. Just as one cannot think of tacks without their function of pinning, so the process of grinding logs into pulp cannot be disconnected from its transformation into paper. Pulp and tack both imply the presence of paper in absentia.
Tumbling Tacks is the only Large-Scale Project to be situated in Scandinavia and the first to be created in a forest environment. It will not be truly completed until the grass, the flowers and the trees, cleared for the installation, have returned, and the sculpture has been observed in the area’s contrasting seasons. There will be a Tumbling Tacks of summer, of autumn, of winter and, again, Tumbling Tacks of spring.
Coosje lived long enough to see the Tacks completed, choose their color, and define their location. She died of cancer on January 10, 2009, four months before their installation.
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Although the image of the artist as a solitary creator has wide currency in our culture, artistic collaboration has a long pedigree. In western civilization, we can find it as far back as the artisans who first shaped and then painted the Greek amphorae, and the Roman workers who assembled mosaic tile floors. Masons built cathedrals in Europe, and major painters such as Leonardo Da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens, and Rembrandt employed studio assistants to work on their paintings. In the twentieth century, there have been a number of notable artistic collaborations in the visual and performing arts as well as in literature. The interaction of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in Paris during the early 1900s gave birth to Cubism and the beginning of modernism in art. Georgia O’Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz formed an artistic partnership based on the principles of modernism and sustained each other’s work over the span of many decades. They were also lovers. The husband-and-wife team Will and Ariel Durant co-authored a number of non-fiction books on western culture, including the classic The Story of Civilization. The choreographer George Balanchine collaborated both with several of his prima ballerinas, two of whom he married, and with the composer Igor Stravinsky. Other couples who collaborated in one way or another over the course of their artistic careers include Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, and Anais Nin and Henry Miller.
Collaboration takes many forms, across a spectrum of involvement. In some cases, it may occur as emotional and financial support during the critical early years of an artist’s development. When Henry Miller was struggling to find himself as a writer living in Paris during the Depression, Anais Nin gave him money for food and shelter, recognized his literary gift and declared her belief in it, helped him find a publisher for Tropic of Cancer, then borrowed the money to pay for its printing. He in turn encouraged her diary writing and gave her editorial assistance for her attempts at fiction. Their collaboration was one of mutual support. They went their separate ways as artists, writing in vastly different styles about their vastly different life experiences. The relationship between Sartre and de Beauvoir is another example of this type of mutually supportive collaboration between artists pursuing different goals.
At the other extreme is the partnership of the Durants, who co-authored a number of books that were published under both their names, a form of collaboration that has been called integrative because two artists fuse their talents in order to accomplish together what neither could accomplish alone. It’s as though their books were written by a third hand. When The Age of Reason was complete, Will Durant wrote, “I saw that it was a cooperative labor, and that simple justice required that the title page should bear both our names . . . Now we proceeded hand in hand, topic by topic, volume by volume, united as we had never been before. It was as if our marriage had received a second consummation.” (John-Steiner, p.14)
There are many reasons why artists collaborate. In addition to the emotional support and encouragement collaboration provides, there is the benefit of varying, perhaps contrasting perspectives on both reality and the uses of artistic media in rendering reality. Writers and painters can learn from each other’s styles and themes. On larger scale projects, such as the environmental art carried out by Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude, there is the advantage of shared labor. Christo focused on design and technical planning while Jeanne-Claude attended to administrative details and financing.
From almost the beginning of his career, Claes Oldenburg was a collaborative artist. Collaboration was part of the revolt against Abstract Expressionism in which he took part. Abstract Expressionism was a movement that exalted the individual artist. Oldenburg’s shift from painting to sculpture came about as a result of his participation in the Happenings of the early 1960s, artistic events that were premised on improvised collaboration not only amongst the performers but with audience members as well. Patty Muchinski’s talents as a seamstress not only enabled Oldenburg to create his revolutionary soft sculptures, her skill may well have sparked the very concept in a synergistic flash. His first “public monument,” the grave in Central Park, was a collaboration using city employees as gravediggers. And his first large-scale project, Lipstick, was created on the initiative of a graduate student at Yale. All of Oldenburg’s subsequent large-scale projects were built as the result of commissions issued by museum and civic officials—they were in this sense all collaborations. Pop Art itself can be seen as a form of collaboration in which the artist appropriates readymade objects from popular culture and puts them in service of an artistic vision not originally intended by their maker.
When Oldenburg met van Bruggen and brought her into his artistic orbit, she changed the nature of his work and enabled, by her vision, the creation of epic public sculptures, beautifully engineered and fabricated, daring in their conceptual originality, striking in their impact on conventional public spaces and on the people who inhabit them. Although some critics have consigned her to the stereotypical female role of “helper,” or “assistant,” or “curator” of Oldenburg’s work, the fact remains that without her involvement in every stage of the creation of their jointly authored works, the art that we think of as Oldenburg’s would have a very different look. Theirs was a true marriage of minds and hearts and sensibilities.
The artistic partnership of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen was unique for both its duration—over thirty years—and for the number and scale of its completed projects—over forty placed in public spaces in Europe and the United States. Not all artistic partnerships between spouses or life-partners endure, or reach such heights of achievement. The marriage and artistic collaboration of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath ended with her suicide and was followed by years of bitter recriminations against Hughes by Plath’s allies. Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, who made several well-received films together, ruptured their working relationship and their marriage with a vitriolic divorce and custody battle that continues to provide fodder for the scandal sheets. In a number of cases involving painter couples—Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner—traditional gender biases have unfairly and often harmfully diminished the stature of the woman, treating her as the moon to her husband’s sun. Oldenburg, throughout his long partnership with his wife, has gone to great lengths in both interviews and in accounts of their joint projects to treat her as his artistic equal and fully integrated collaborator. So, if I may paraphrase the bard, let us not to the marriage of two minds admit impediments.
View sculptures here.
Further Reading
Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology. New York: Guggenheim Museum; Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1995.
Claes Oldenburg, Coosje van Bruggen. A Bottle of Notes and Some Voyages. New York: Rizzoli, 1988.
Rose, Barbara. Claes Oldenburg. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970.
Arthur Hoyle (www.arthurhoyle.com) is the author of The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur and Mavericks, Mystics, and Misfits: Americans Against the Grain. He reviews biography for the New York Journal of Books. His Substack newsletter Off the Cuff offers periodic commentary on the American cultural scene. Subscribe at https://arthurhoyle.substack.
