Since November, “Architect’s Handkerchief” (1999), Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s 12-foot-tall abstract hankie sprouting from a breast pocket has waved from the street-level plaza of Lever House, at 390 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. The sculpture’s baroque white folds evoke the creamy marble of a Bernini, voluptuous even as its reinforced plastic would be useless to dab an eye. It offers different comfort, a visual rest stop from the rigid geometry unfolding around it.
Incredibly, for an artist who made New York his home for nearly 70 years, none of the fanciful public sculptures like these — the ones for which Oldenburg is most celebrated — are on permanent view in the city. This presentation at Lever House, a 1952 jewel of midcentury International Style, is a temporary correction, the first of Oldenburg’s work in New York since his death here in 2022. It includes the Gulliverian “Plantoir, Red (Mid-Scale)” (2001-2021), and a selection of smaller sculptures and schematic drawings.
The architect of “Architect’s Handkerchief” is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the last director of the Bauhaus and spiritual daddy of modernist architecture, whose Seagram Building is a clear shot across Park Avenue from Lever (designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill).
Oldenburg’s affection for Mies no doubt developed in Chicago, where both had first settled after emigrating from Europe (This “Architect’s Handkerchief,” from an edition of three, was plucked from Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.) The Seagram Building is Mies’s only contribution to the New York skyline, making the work’s placement a canny distillation of Mies’s arm’s-length embrace of New York.
Oldenburg had no such ambivalence. He moved to New York City in 1956, and his art quickly absorbed the city’s ecstatic cacophony. He thrilled to the East Village’s dereliction and street trash, the messy detritus of daily life whose tactile splendors convinced him to abandon painting for sculpture.
In 1960 he cobbled together newspaper and cardboard he found in the gutters to make “The Street,” a weirdly charming panorama of street life. The next year, he opened “The Store,” a functioning shop out of his East Second Street studio that sold bumpy facsimiles of daily life: clammy painted plaster cake slices and coagulated sandwiches that somehow managed to be appealing. He declared allegiance to art that “accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.”
Oldenburg shared his contemporaries’ suspicion of postwar consumerism, but brought to Pop Art an absurdist streak. The machined and mass-produced transmuted into the rumpled and lumpen, the incidental made heroic, as he wrote, “how near can a thing come to being it and not be it.”
The presentation at Lever House, in conjunction with Paula Cooper Gallery, which represents the Oldenburg and van Bruggen estate as a single entity, is the second following Lever House’s purchase and extensive renovation by Brookfield Properties and WatermanCLARK. Oldenburg’s gloopy piles of toast would seem to be in direct opposition to Lever House’s midcentury polish, but his concerns chime here in slyly seditious ways.
Developed in 1950 as the international headquarters of the Lever Brothers soap company, it was a locus of the pumping commodity culture to which Pop artists responded. Several generations later, Oldenburg’s toothbrushes and spurting tubes of toothpastes occupy the original steel-rimmed vitrines that once (unironically) levitated Lever Brothers consumer products like works of art. The effect is a bit like getting a John Chamberlain onto a GM factory floor.
Lever House’s history of art patronage began with its previous owner, the real estate tycoon Aby Rosen, who bought the building in 1998 and for 20 years used the lobby to host exhibitions of blue-chip art; he also commissioned new work that entered its collection. The two presentations under Brookfield have responded more to the architecture than the market (Tom Sachs put a bronze Hello Kitty statue in the plaza in 2008 — jarring but not in a good way).
The current presentation is concise, less of a museum-length survey than an amuse bouche of Oldenburg’s career: two monumental outdoor pieces and inside, two soft sculptures that had been in Oldenburg’s studio for decades (a limp, suede string bean slithering up a steel support column; a saw-shaped flag whose gossamer fabric blade diffuses the headlights of downtown traffic); seven tabletop sculptures (a petrified pile of toast and bag of candy from “The Store”); and as many drawings. Yet it’s enough to get the flavor of Oldenburg’s humor, the psychoanalytic precision with which he dismantled modern life’s anxieties and desires, and the serious unseriousness with which he rebuilt them.
Oldenburg’s art was relentlessly Freudian, channeling a latent eroticism that could get tedious (a lot of gushing and engorged phalluses). But the pieces linked libidinal fetishes with consumerist ones, a truth whose relevance has only inflated. Oldenburg’s art inflated too, losing some of its endearing rawness for cartoony heft, which perhaps explains why most of the larger work landed elsewhere, where it wouldn’t be overwhelmed by New York’s architectural density, or where there’s more tolerance for whimsy. (It seems unlikely that New Yorkers would abide a 45-foot clothespin straddling a subway entrance, as one has in Philadelphia since 1976.)
There are unexpected treasures, including a 1962 proposal to replace 200 Park Avenue, formerly the Pan Am Building, with an upturned Good Humor Bar, a bite taken out of a corner to allow for the flow of traffic. (Unilever had acquired Good Humor the year before; the sketch’s inclusion here imagines an alternate corporate history.)
But it’s “Plantoir,” an oversize gardener’s trowel, and the last outdoor work that Oldenburg and van Bruggen, his second wife and frequent collaborator, produced before her death in 2009 (this version was manufactured expressly for this show), that ends up being the most poignant. It recalls Oldenburg’s public artwork “Placid Civic Monument,” in which he hired grave diggers to excavate six feet of Central Park earth and refill it a few hours later. That work is alternately described as an early earthwork or performance, though mostly it’s emblematic of Oldenburg’s willingness to reshape art into its most humane expression, to make it as plain and universal as dying. Opening up a grave behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art is also as deadpan as it gets.
“Plantoir” is far less disruptive, plunged cheerily into its own plinth. It’s positioned near the building’s white marble planter that leaks through a glass wall and into the lobby, teasing out the public-private, art and commerce tensions of Oldenburg’s art, and gets at why the presentation ultimately succeeds.
Corporate engagement with art is usually a wan attempt at image laundering or tax write-off. Brookfield Properties, which mostly develops and owns shopping malls, has hired the art adviser Jacob King to organize thoughtful commissions and temporary exhibitions. (King organized a subtle display of work by Ellsworth Kelly last year here.) It probably helps that Bruce Flatt, Brookfield’s chief executive, and his wife, Lonti Ebers, are collectors, and that Ebers is a trustee of MoMA.
Brookfield surely has more resources than average, and corporate charitableness is rarely completely benevolent. But the alternative — allowing art to molder, unseen, in private collections or languish in storage, is worse. More important, the presentation fulfills Oldenburg’s requirements for art “that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.” That’s harder than it sounds.
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