Claes Oldenburg’s commitment to familiar objects has shaped accounts of his career, but his associations with Pop art and postwar consumerism have overshadowed another crucial aspect of his work. In this revealing reassessment, Katherine Smith traces Oldenburg’s profound responses to shifting urban conditions, framing his enduring relationship with the city as a critical perspective and conceiving his art as urban theory.
Smith argues that Oldenburg adapted lessons of context, gleaned from New York’s changing cityscape in the late 1950s, to large-scale objects and architectural plans. By examining disparate projects from New York to Los Angeles, she situates Oldenburg’s innovations in local geographies and national debates. In doing so, Smith illuminates patterns of urbanization through the important contributions of one of the leading artists in the United States.
Katherine Smith is Professor of Art History at Agnes Scott College.
"Smith’s book brings together a broad variety of interesting artworks, some of them hardly known, by one of the most important artists of the last fifty years. Her deep research reveals the connections between Oldenburg’s art and the fascinating postwar decades that thoroughly changed American urban life."—Joshua Shannon, author of The Disappearance of Objects: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City
"Smith persuasively argues that Oldenburg's ebullient interventions in public space result from a unique perspective on the ordinary, pedestrian life of the street. The more I think about this book, the more I am convinced that Oldenburg—an immigrant and an erstwhile Midwesterner—is the quintessentially American sculptor."—Miguel de Baca, author of Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture
“A thoughtful and illuminating account of the city as both the material and the subject of Claes Oldenburg’s art. Smith builds on substantive archival and historical research to uncover hitherto unexplored aspects of the artist’s project, presenting Oldenburg as an artist whose work is inextricably connected to the spaces, personages, and tensions of postwar urban experience.”—Michael Lobel, Professor of Art History, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
352 pp.7 x 10Illus: 82 color illustrations, 75 b/w illustrations, 2 line drawings
9780520305489$65.00|£55.00Hardcover
Mar 2021