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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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Claes Oldenburg
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: January 28
Designer
Drawer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Performance Artist
Printmaker
Sculptor
Sthlm
Ḳlaʼes Oldenberg
Claes Thure Oldenburg
Enough
Large
Pose
Would
Figures
Drew
People
Painting
Painted
Side
Apartment
Sides
Lower
Quite
Finally
Found
East
Reverted
Come
Figure
Nudes

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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it.
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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.
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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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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.
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There's always been a potential erotic possibility with objects.
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Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication.
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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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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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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.
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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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The art world was very small and the people got together at parties. There was less commercialism.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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All the fun is locking horns with impossibilities.
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My mother warned me to avoid things colored red.
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