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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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Claes Oldenburg
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: January 28
Designer
Drawer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Performance Artist
Printmaker
Sculptor
Sthlm
Ḳlaʼes Oldenberg
Claes Thure Oldenburg
Went
Bows
Art
Paintings
School
Oil
Back
Performance
Firsts
Performances
First
Spent
Michigan
Made
Summer
Institute
Really
Painting
Awakened

More quotes by Claes Oldenburg

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All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.
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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.
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For a thorough use of ice cream cones, buy two eat one and drop the other.
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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.
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Ox-Bow was a very free place, very open. You could do whatever you wanted to do.
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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.
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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.
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The art world was very small and the people got together at parties. There was less commercialism.
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I'm in favor of an art that does something other than just sit on its ass in a museum.
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The right angle is one of the world's basic shapes.
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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.
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There's always been a potential erotic possibility with objects.
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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.
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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.
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You can take an object and simply put anything you want in that object, and I accessed that partly through Freudian ideas.
Claes Oldenburg
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My mother warned me to avoid things colored red.
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.
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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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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.
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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