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Dimensions: 46 1/2 by 63 1/2 in. 118.1 by 161.3 cm.
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Provenance: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION
Green Gallery, New York
Mr. and Mrs. Robert B. Mayer, Chicago
Sotheby's, New York, October 26, 1972, Lot 41
Acquired by the present owner from the above
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Exhibited: New York, Martha Jackson Gallery, Environments, Situations, Spaces, May - June 1961
New York, Ray Gun Manufacturing Co., The Store, December 1961 - January 1962
Dallas Museum of Contemporary Art, 1961, 1962
Oberlin, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Three Young Americans, January 1963
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Americans 1963, May - August 1963, p. 76, illustrated
Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Selections from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Robert B. Mayer, July - September 1968, np., illustrated
Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Aspekte der 60er Jahre aus der Sammlung Reinhard Onnasch, February - April 1978, p. 55, illustrated
Cologne, Messehallen, Westkunst, Contemporary Art Since 1939, May - August 1981, cat. no. 643 p. 452, illustrated
London, Royal Academy of Arts; Cologne, Museum Ludwig; Madrid, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Pop Art: An International Perspective, September 1991 - September 1992, cat. no. 161, pl. no. 30, p. 83, illustrated in color (in the London catalogue) and p. 85, illustrated in color (in the Cologne catalogue)
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art; Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art; New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Bonn, Kunst - und Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland; London, Hayward Gallery, Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology, February 1995 - August 1996, cat. no. 25, p. 80, illustrated in color
Hamburg, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Extended Loan, 1997 - 2001
Barcelona, Museu d'Art Contemporani; Serralves, Museu Serralves, Museu d'Arte Contemporanea, The Onnasch Collection: Aspects of Contemporary Art, November 2001 - February 2002, p. 57, illustrated in color
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Literature: Gene Baro, "A Gathering of the Americans", Arts Magazine, September 1963, Vol. 37, p. 30, illustrated
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Notes: Claes Oldenburg moved to New York city (from Chicago) in June of 1956, into an art world still in the throws of Abstract Expressionist and the "action painters" which made it so famous. Intrigued as he was by the very cerebral movement of Jackson Pollock and others, Oldenburg quickly became friends with artists like Alan Kaprow, John Cage, Tom Wesselmann and others, who were not as interested in abstraction. These artists were more concerned with the mundane - everyday, and they sought to break down the boundaries between art and life. Through constructed environments, they explored the objectification of consumer objects which reflected America's celebration of consumption.
Oldenburg began working on both Happenings as well as drawings and sculpture in 1959 and 1960. The first project that combined the two was called The Street. The Street works were based on life on the street and was first exhibited at the Judson in 1960 with Tom Wesselmann. The slums of the Lower East Side and Orchard Street provided the background for the gray, frayed, torn, bent and dark sculptures of both people and objects. Oldenburg comments "The most important key to my work is probably that it originates in actual experience however far my metaphoric capacities may carry it. A dramatic piece such as The Street at the Judson in 1960 or its environmental counterpart (at the Reuben later) had their origin in very specific aspects of New York and Chicago streets" (Barbara Rose in Exh. Cat., The Museum of Modern Art, Claes Oldenburg, p. 48) These images, based on the decomposition of society were the artist's first forray into three-dimensional art. However, they still provided a happening-type of stage in which to exhibit the works. The Street provided Oldenburg with a way to study the existential humanity of life and death (of both objects and people), and the cyclical nature of our society. As The Street works became about scarceness, his next series entitled The Store would be about affluence and excess.
In the Fall of 1960 specifically, Oldenburg began to draw watercolors and drawings of various storefront windows and merchandise. Early in 1961, he began his first sculptures for this series. They are comprised of muslin which has been soaked in plaster and which is then built up over chicken wire. The artist then splashes, drips and paints them in bright colors (somewhat reminiscent of his precursors, the abstract expressionists...). Sewing Machine from 1961 belongs to the now very famous exhibition at Ray Gun Manufacturing Co. called The Store. It's brightly colored exterior displays beautifully the aesthetic of The Store as a whole. Ellen Johnson notes that "Oldenburg's Store was about art and about fact and fantasy, ambiguity, eroticism, and materialism. It was about idealism and freedom, mobility and change, and about life and death in life. The Store was about almost as many things as there were people who saw it and objects in it, objects whose intense existence is imbued with the plastic life which Oldenburg gave to them and with the life of the human beings whose needs, desires and emotions they signify and educe...." (Ellen Johnson, Claes Oldenburg, Middlesex, 1971, p. 19). The present work is a beautiful and seminal early example of how Oldenburg would strive to imbue his sculptures with an anthropomorphic sense of self. The dresses are blowing in the wind that is not real. They are three-dimensional, but not completely realistic. It is organic, yet is frozen in motion. It is hard and soft at the same time. The Store is an attempt by Oldenburg to capture the city - in a room of familiar and psychologically engaging items. In his own words "I have always felt the need of correspondence between one's art and one's life. I feel my purpose is to say something about my times...for me this involves a recreation of my vision of the times...my reality, or my drama-reality, and this demands a form of a theatrical nature..." (Germano Celant in Exh. Cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology, New York, 1995, p. 23). Oldenburg was present at The Store as long as it was up and open to the public. He played a very key role in presenting himself and the objects as one unit, expressing the push pull relationship of desire and commodity. This would become the key to Pop art as we know it today. Whereas other Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein brought the low (popular) and transformed it into the high (art), Oldenburg sought to immerse his viewers in the everyday - to make them think about what they consumed and why. Thus the tenants of Pop art were borne.
Oldenburg, while he may have been working alongside artists like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Tom Wesselmann and Robert Rauschenberg, was unique in his ability to express his concerns and issues with the consumerist society of the day. He influenced them as well as was influenced by them. They became a group which changed forever the way the world would look at both art, and at a supermarket shelf. Sewing Machine beautifully exhibits all of these issues still today and endlessly thrills the eye and the mind.
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