Quote

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

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
Takes
Extends
Lines
Coarse
Art
Blunt
Form
Twists
Life
Spit
Heavy
Drips
Sweet
Spits
Stupid
Accumulates

More quotes by Claes Oldenburg

Image
Ox-Bow was a very free place, very open. You could do whatever you wanted to do.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
My work doesn't have the same rules as, say, Andy [Warhol]'s work. But it's gathered together for the simple reason that we all worked with the images and objects around us.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
In 1958 I finally found a large enough apartment on the Lower East Side, where I reverted to figure painting. I drew and painted quite a lot of figures and nudes. People would come and pose for me.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
There's always been a potential erotic possibility with objects.
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
I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.
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 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
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
My rule was not to paint things as they were. I wasn't copying I was remaking them as my own.
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
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
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 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
For a thorough use of ice cream cones, buy two eat one and drop the other.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
My mother warned me to avoid things colored red.
Claes Oldenburg
Image
The right angle is one of the world's basic shapes.
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