{"id":4224,"date":"2013-04-12T17:11:23","date_gmt":"2013-04-13T00:11:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=4224"},"modified":"2013-04-14T17:17:40","modified_gmt":"2013-04-15T00:17:40","slug":"4224","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2013\/04\/12\/4224\/","title":{"rendered":"Giant guffaws at a pompous art world"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Dark Roots of a Pop Master\u2019s Sunshine<\/h1>\n

By\u00a0BLAKE GOPNIK<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"
\n
Todd Heisler\/The New York Times<\/em><\/p>\n

Paying a visit to Claes Oldenburg, one of the last surviving giants of Pop Art, you\u2019d be forgiven for expecting a wacky guy living in chaos. His crowd-pleasing masterworks \u2014 a canvas hamburger the size of a couch, a rusting clothespin as big as a house, a lipstick tall as a tree \u2014 can easily be read as giant guffaws at a pompous art world. His gorgeous sketches for those projects are as wild and woolly as could be. So yes, you\u2019d be forgiven for expecting a scene from a shaggy New Yorker cartoon by Ed Koren \u2014 forgiven, and mistaken.<\/p>\n

Mr. Oldenburg\u2019s five-story studio, on the western edge of SoHo, is utterly tidy, its classic loft spaces furnished with rigorous Bauhaus classics and hard-edge Minimal pieces by Donald Judd. Mr. Oldenburg, who is 84, wears stylish round tortoiseshell glasses and receives his guest with more Old World gentility than New York pushiness. (He was born in Sweden, into a diplomat\u2019s household.) He reveals a sense of humor, joking about how a big newspaper ad for his\u00a0forthcoming show<\/a>\u00a0at the Museum of Modern Art, opening Sunday, has been upstaged by one for a show about whales. But there\u2019s no trace of the clown, and there\u2019s plenty of orderly retrospection.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you really want to be an artist, you search yourself, and you find a lot of it comes from earlier times,\u201d he said. \u201cI have pretty much built the work around my experiences. When I\u2019ve moved from one place to another, the work has changed.\u201d He came to New York in 1956 from Chicago, where he was mostly raised, and settled on the Lower East Side, which he describes as New York\u2019s \u201cmost creative and stimulating part.\u201d<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times Dark Roots of a Pop Master\u2019s Sunshine By\u00a0BLAKE GOPNIK Todd Heisler\/The New York Times Paying a visit to Claes Oldenburg, one of the last surviving giants of Pop Art, you\u2019d be forgiven for expecting a wacky guy living in chaos. His crowd-pleasing masterworks \u2014 a canvas hamburger the size of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}