Claes Oldenburg Drawings in the Whitney Museum of American Art

Best known for recasting familiar objects in unfamiliar textures, media, and dimensions, Claes Oldenburg has long challenged his audience to rethink the everyday with works such as French Fries and Ketchup (1963) and Soft Toilet (1966). Oldenburg's masterful drawings reveal another facet of this pioneering artist, inviting viewers to enter his "fantasy' as they explore Oldenburg's relationship with the medium, from sensitive early explorations to veteran campaigns as a refined and accomplished draftsman.
Drawing is crucial to Oldenburg's art: drawings note the beginning of an idea; they develop the thought; they give birth to his sculptures. The medium offers a flexibility particularly suited to the artist's extraordinary visions, enhancing the effectiveness of his manipulations of scale and perspective in sculpture. Pieces such as Proposed Colossal Monument for Central Park North, N.Y.C.- Teddy Bear (1965); Various Positions of a Giant Lipstick to Replace the Fountain of Eros, Piccadilly Circus, London (1966); Proposal for a Cathedral in the Form of a Colossal Faucet, Lake Union, Seattle (1972); and Blueberry Pie a la Mode, Sliding down a Hill (1996) usher viewers into a chimerical world of the mundane made significant.