Oldenburg went to college at Yale University, but upon graduation, he was drawn back to his hometown. As his first wife and close artistic collaborator Patty Mucha recalls, “Claes could justify what I thought was his dirty-old-man habit by using these images to make some outrageously shocking, yet beautiful drawings.” Oldenburg would return to those clubs when he came back to Chicago as an adult. This early drawing by Claes Oldenburg appeared first in Chicago in 1953, and again in 1954 to illustrate a story entitled “Dance of Triumph.” He and his classmates would play baseball and stickball on the roof of the building, which is still home to the school’s pre-K through fourth grade students. “The details of the plug give a sketch of brutality-the locked caps, their chains, the blunt construction.” In the late 60s, the fireplugs that intrigued him as a child would become the template for hard sculptures, soft sculptures, proposed monuments, and even cuff links.įrom third grade through high school, Oldenburg attended the private Chicago Latin School for Boys, a 15-minute walk north from that first Chicago home.
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“I saw firemen vengefully run their hoses through the windows of a car parked by the plug in winter, causing the car to become a solid block of ice,” he reminisced in his notebook years later. The fire hydrant on the street (which he called a “fireplug” in the vernacular of the day) proved to be a locus for drama and a cause for contemplation. The scenery outside his third-story bedroom window provided more fodder for his imagination. Rose-a primary biographer of Oldenburg-asserts that, “Like the work that Oldenburg was to produce as a mature artist, Neubern was a parody of reality, providing a counterpart cosmos that paralleled the real world instead of imitating it.”
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The young artist, left to his own devices in his father’s offices, engaged in elaborate, fanciful world-building he chronicled the geography and culture of an imaginary island, which he called “Neubern,” in endless maps, models, newspapers, and even movie posters.
Even after his later move east, Chicago often served as a municipal muse for his groundbreaking body of work. He was raised in the city from the age of seven, attended the Latin School through 12th grade, and (after college) returned to become a journalist at the famed City News Bureau, attend classes at the School of the Art Institute, and contribute dozens of illustrations for Chicago magazine. But Oldenburg’s Chicago roots were deep and tangled. Much commentary on the artist starts with his 1956 arrival in New York City, as if he had sprouted-fully formed-from the brow of abstract expressionism.
Indeed, Oldenburg’s ties to the city went far beyond one humongous bat. equals Chicago,” wrote Oldenburg in his notebook, playfully connecting his initials to the city that nurtured him when he was young and continued to loom large in his imagination as he became a globe-trotting art world luminary. He was also a distinctly Chicago artist, a distinction that received only scant acknowledgement in local obituaries. Oldenburg, who died in July 2022 at age 93, was one of pop art’s most prominent exemplars. In Kansas City, you’ll find a shuttlecock the size of a steeple. It is the largest sculpture created by the artist Claes Oldenburg, a man from whose mind sprang any number of super-sized objects: a 45-foot tall clothespin in Philadelphia, a 29-foot-long spoon in Minneapolis. Best of Chicago 2022: Music & NightlifeĪt the corner of Madison and Jefferson in Chicago stands a 100-foot-high baseball bat, constructed in a lattice pattern from 20 tons of steel.Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.
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