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My mother warned me to avoid things colored red.

Claes Oldenburg

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

More quotes by Claes Oldenburg

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I am for an art of things lost or thrown away. . . I am for an art that one smokes like a cigarette. . . I am for an art that flutters like a flag.
Claes Oldenburg
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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
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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
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I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all.
Claes Oldenburg
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The art world was very small and the people got together at parties. There was less commercialism.
Claes Oldenburg
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My rule was not to paint things as they were. I wasn't copying I was remaking them as my own.
Claes Oldenburg
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Food is like clay you can sculpt with it. Also it has an odor, and you can eat it. I don't eat a lot of cake, but I do make cakes! And unlike the Campbell's Soup Cans, my food is a humanized form and scale.
Claes Oldenburg
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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
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I don't do abstract art because I don't find it as interesting as I do subjects and depictions.
Claes Oldenburg
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Ox-Bow was a very free place, very open. You could do whatever you wanted to do.
Claes Oldenburg
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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
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For a thorough use of ice cream cones, buy two eat one and drop the other.
Claes Oldenburg
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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
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Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.
Claes Oldenburg
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Andy [Warhol] was on the scene, but he wasn't an artist at first he was more an illustrator. He was always surrounded by about ten people who worshipped him. He'd go to a party and they would all come along. But he was drawing shoes and that sort of thing.
Claes Oldenburg
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I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ass in a museum.
Claes Oldenburg
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I had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn't make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I'd become a writer.
Claes Oldenburg
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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
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I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.
Claes Oldenburg
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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