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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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Claes Oldenburg
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: January 28
Designer
Drawer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Performance Artist
Printmaker
Sculptor
Sthlm
Ḳlaʼes Oldenberg
Claes Thure Oldenburg
Ideas
Take
Accessed
Freudian
Partly
Object
Objects
Simply
Anything

More quotes by Claes Oldenburg

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There's always been a potential erotic possibility with objects.
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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Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.
Claes Oldenburg
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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
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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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The art world was very small and the people got together at parties. There was less commercialism.
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 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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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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The right angle is one of the world's basic shapes.
Claes Oldenburg
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All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.
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 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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My mother warned me to avoid things colored red.
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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For a thorough use of ice cream cones, buy two eat one and drop the other.
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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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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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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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