Gardners Art through the Ages A Global History

that the age of mass media would enable everyone to become fa-

mous for 15 minutes. His own fame has lasted much longer.

CLAES OLDENBURG The Swedish-born Pop artist Claes

Oldenburg(b. 1929) has produced sculptures that incisively com-

ment on American consumer culture. His early works consisted of

reliefs of food and clothing items. Oldenburg constructed these

sculptures of plaster layered on chicken wire and muslin, painting

them with cheap commercial house enamel. In later works, focused

on the same subjects, he shifted to large-scale stuffed sculptures of

sewn vinyl or canvas. Examples of both types of sculptures appear in

the photograph (FIG. 36-26) of his one-person show at the Green

Gallery in New York in 1962. Oldenburg had included many of the

works in this exhibition in an earlier show he mounted titled The

Store—an appropriate comment on the function of art as a com-

modity in a consumer society. Over the years, Oldenburg’s sculpture

has become increasingly monumental. In recent decades, he and his

wife and collaborator, Dutch American Coosje van Bruggen (b.

1942), have become particularly well known for their mammoth

outdoor sculptures of familiar, commonplace objects, such as cue

balls, shuttlecocks, clothespins, and torn notebooks.

Superrealism

Like the Pop artists, the artists associated with Superrealism sought a

form of artistic communication that was more accessible to the pub-

lic than the remote, unfamiliar visual language of the Abstract Ex-

pressionists, Post-Painterly Abstractionists, and Minimalists. The

Superrealists expanded Pop’s iconography in both painting and

sculpture by making images in the late 1960s and 1970s involving

scrupulous fidelity to optical fact. Because many Superrealists used

photographs as sources for their imagery, art historians also refer to

this postwar art movement as Photorealism.

AUDREY FLACKAmerican artist Audrey Flack(b. 1931) was

one of Superrealism’s pioneers. Her paintings, such as Marilyn (FIG.

36-27), were not simply technical exercises in recording objects in

minute detail but were also conceptual inquiries into the nature of

photography and the extent to which photography constructs an

understanding of reality. Flack observed that “[photography is] my

whole life, I studied art history, it was always photographs, I never saw

the paintings, they were in Europe....Look at TV and at magazines

36-26Claes Oldenburg,various works

exhibited at the Green Gallery, New York,

1962.

Oldenburg’s painted plaster and stuffed

vinyl sculptures magnify familiar items of

American consumer culture. The title of one

of his shows, The Store,was a comment on

art itself as a commodity.

36-27Audrey Flack,Marilyn,1977. Oil over acrylic on canvas,

8  8 . University of Arizona Museum, Tucson (museum purchase with

funds provided by the Edward J. Gallagher Jr. Memorial Fund).

Flack’s pioneering Photorealist still lifes record objects with great

optical fidelity. Marilynalludes to Dutch vanitas paintings (FIG. 25-21)

and incorporates multiple references to the transience of life.

Painting and Sculpture, 1945 to 1970 985

1 ft.

36-26A
OLDENBURG,
Lipstick on
Caterpillar
Tracks,1969.

36-26BSAINT-
PHALLE, Black
Venus,
1965–1967.