Artist Birthday: Claes Oldenburg

Oldenburg believed that art should literally be made of the ordinary world. His theory was that the reality of art would replace everyday reality. An important early work was The Street (1960). It consisted of common urban garbage covered with graffiti-like drawing. Letter Tenement imitates the form of the tenements in New York, once home to the immigrants that flowed into the US in the late 1800s to early 1900s, a fact which Oldenburg greatly respected about their history, particularly since many of those immigrants -- who helped build this country -- were treated like trash when they arrived.

Artist birthday for January 29th: Claes Oldenburg (1929–2022, US, born in Sweden)

Claes Oldenburg was the ultimate example of an artist who created great artworks through appropriation and recontextualization.

Claes Oldenburg, Letter Tenement, 1960, oil, paint, rags, and wood, 29" x 4" (73.7 x 10.2 cm). Image courtesy of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY, © 2025 Estate of Claes Oldenburg (AK-1026)

The strongest visual component of this piece is the lettering, some of which resolves into vague names, perhaps references to the energy left behind in New York's tenements by the immigrants of the 1800s Surrealism and Dada of the first half of the 1900s influenced Pop Art, which developed in the 1950s as a reaction to the dominance of Abstract Expressionism in American art. Like the two earlier movements, much of Pop Art relied on everyday found objects, the insistence of chance as an element of creation, and the redefinition of what was valid subject matter. Pop artists turned to objects and events of the everyday world in the United States, the most materialistic and commercial society in the world.

Claes Oldenburg was born in Stockholm, but his father, a Swedish diplomat, moved the family to the United States when he was a child. Moving first to New York, then Chicago, Oldenburg attended Yale University, and then studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While attending the Art Institute, he had his first public show of some of his satirical drawings.

After graduating, Oldenburg moved to New York. He immediately became involved in the germinal Pop Art movement, befriending performance artist Allan Kaprow (born 1927). He also associated with Pop Art painter Jim Dine (born 1930). Oldenburg’s first show in New York in the mid-1950s was a collection of found objects, and sculptures made of found pieces of wood, paper and string.