Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. (Reviews: New York).WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York City, founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. It was an outgrowth of the Whitney Studio (1914–18), the Whitney Studio Club (1918–28), and the Whitney Studio Galleries (1928–30). Opened to the public in 1931, the museum actively supports American art through the purchase and exhibition of the work of living artists. The Whitney owns ninety-two of Claes Oldenburg Oldenburg, former state, GermanyOldenburg (ôl`dənb rkh), former state, NW Germany. It is now included in the state of Lower Saxony. The city of Oldenburg was the capital. The former state consisted of three widely separated divisions.'s drawings (the largest such collection anywhere) and all were on exhibition this summer at the museum, displayed in two groups-those from 1959 to 1977, and those the artist made with his second wife, Coosje van Bruggen, from 1992 to 1998. One is tempted to ask what the difference is between these two periods and an answer is suggested by Oldenburg's definition of drawing as "the accidental ability to coordinate your fantasy with your hand." The later work seems less fantastic and accidental and looks predetermined, as if the drawings were documenting sculptures that were already commissioned, whereas the earlier drawings appear spontaneous and experimental--each one the "impulsive" rendering of an "idea," to use Oldenburg's language again. The loss of intimacy makes it seem as though going public had become more important to the artist than having fresh impulses. Put another way, in works made at the outset of his career, Oldenburg seems absorbed in the act of drawing rather than in the act of representing--with his imagery inseparable from the drawing process. The artist's energy and invention fail off during his passage from the phallic 1. Of, relating to, or resembling a phallus. 2. Of or relating to the third stage of psychosexual development in psychoanalytic theory during which the genital organs first become the focus of sexual feeling. No longer made using a more or less automatist process, the preparatory drawings that accompanied these later sculptures have none of the artist's original metamorphic power, by which ordinary objects changed before our eyes into extraordinarily suggestive forms, often nightmarish as well as sexual, as happens in the weirdly tragicomic Two Fagends Together 1, 1968. The Whitney's two charcoal studies of Perfume Bottle, Fallen, 1992, show something of Oldenburg's caricatural drama and touch; but Soft Shuttlecocks, Falling, Number Two, 1995, looks like a fancy illustration. Oldenburg's sculptures no longer work as ironic double entendres--lipstick is no longer a rocket or tank gun, for example, as it is in a study for the 1969 monument for Yale University, a marvelous blending of libido 1. sexual desire. 2. the psychic energy derived from instinctive biological drives; in early freudian theory it was restricted to the sexual drive, then expanded to all expressions of love and pleasure, but has evolved to include also the death instinct.libid´inal li·bi·do and hostility, but one-dimensional objects. Having lost their unconscious charge, the late drawings and sculptures are comfortably self-conscious, but no longer with any dynamic sense of the self. |
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