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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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Claes Oldenburg
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: January 28
Designer
Drawer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Performance Artist
Printmaker
Sculptor
Sthlm
Ḳlaʼes Oldenberg
Claes Thure Oldenburg
Become
Went
School
Class
Ideas
High
Make
Bigs
Idea
Art
Impression
Didn
Writer
Thought
College

More quotes by 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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All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.
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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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
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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
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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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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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The art world was very small and the people got together at parties. There was less commercialism.
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
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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
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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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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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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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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
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My mother warned me to avoid things colored red.
Claes Oldenburg
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The right angle is one of the world's basic shapes.
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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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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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
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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