Quote

My mother warned me to avoid things colored red.

Claes Oldenburg

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Claes Oldenburg
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: January 28
Designer
Drawer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Performance Artist
Printmaker
Sculptor
Sthlm
Ḳlaʼes Oldenberg
Claes Thure Oldenburg
Things
Warned
Colored
Red
Avoid
Mother

More quotes by Claes Oldenburg

Image
Because my work is naturally non-meaningful, the meaning found in it will remain doubtful and inconsistent - which is the way it should be. All that I care about is that, like any startling piece of nature, it should be capable of stimulating meaning.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I was very happy to be living in New York at that time, more than in the present time. Now it's all commerce.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I just started to do my own thing for about a year and a half, and I worked in the evening selling phonograph records. Then I said to myself, I'm afraid I have to go to New York after all.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
You can take an object and simply put anything you want in that object, and I accessed that partly through Freudian ideas.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
They asked me to do a show, and I was planning on showing my figure paintings. But my friends told me I shouldn't - the paintings were good but a little old-fashioned. They said, Why don't you show the other stuff? I had also been making rather strange objects, more in the Freudian tradition.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
It was easy to get a job at the Cedar Bar because people came and went, but I didn't like the atmosphere. Instead, I got a job at Cooper Union Library. I stayed at Cooper Union for seven years it was my salvation. While I worked there, I also read books of every kind.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
Of course, the '60s was a study in decadence. Everything just got worse and worse, and at the end of the '60s, everything was so horrible that people were killing each other.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I went back to the Art Institute, then spent the summer at the Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. That's what really awakened me. I made a lot of oil paintings and my first performance.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
Ox-Bow was a very free place, very open. You could do whatever you wanted to do.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
Duchamp is known for calling a thing art, rather than making it. A lot of that is picked up in pop art, too.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I got a job as a dishwasher in Oakland, and I would draw all day. It was nice because the lady who ran the boardinghouse where I worked let me live there for nothing if I gave her some drawings every week - mostly park drawings of birds and such.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
The art world was very small and the people got together at parties. There was less commercialism.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
The right angle is one of the world's basic shapes.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I knew I wasn't that good a writer, and all I could remember was that I could draw. I'm better at drawing than I am at writing.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ass in a museum.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.
Claes Oldenburg