at van Bruggen’s suggestion, a sculpture on its side.
2
THE ARTISTS
God sometimes grants unto a man to learn and know how to make a thing the like whereof, in his day, no other can conceive it; and perhaps not for a time before and after him does another soon come.
—Albrecht Dürer, Letters
Claes Oldenburg was born January 28, 1929, in Stockholm, Sweden. The family lived in New York and Oslo, Norway, before settling in Chicago in 1936, where his father served as consul general for Sweden.1 Oldenburg entered Yale University in 1946 with an interest in literature. He returned to Chicago on graduation to work as an apprentice reporter at the City News Bureau while pursuing further studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Oldenburg became an American citizen in 1953. Three years later he moved to New York City, where the downtown Judson and Reuben galleries became the base for his exhibitions of sculptures made of cardboard, wire, and paper, exhibited as The Street (1960). In 1961 he rented a storefront, which he called “The Store,” where he made colorful commercial goods out of painted plaster. He also used The Store for a series of performances called Ray Gun Theater, in which his artist-wife, Patty Muschinski (now Mucha), participated. She later assisted in the sewing of his soft sculptures. Their ten-year marriage ended in 1970.
Coosje van Bruggen was born in Groningen, the Netherlands, in 1942, the daughter of a physician. After completing her Doctorandus degree in art history at the University of Groningen, she joined the curatorial staff of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where she met Oldenburg in January 1970 at the installation of a traveling retrospective of his work.
Their next encounter revolved around one of Oldenburg’s first large-scale sculptures, the 41-foot-high Trowel I, sited in the Sonsbeek exhibition in Arnheim in 1971. Following the exhibition, Trowel I was placed in park grounds near the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. Oldenburg and van Bruggen corresponded about the iconography of Trowel I and from time to time in the years that followed discussed its site and appearance. In September 1975 the sculptors met in Otterlo to inspect the work, which had greatly deteriorated in the intervening years. R. W. D. Oxenaar, the director of the museum, agreed to have the work remade and resited. Van Bruggen the critic/art historian became sculptor/collaborator when she disapproved of its silvery surface and suggested instead a blue hue based on the color of Dutch workmen’s overalls. Trowel I was taken down and rebuilt, painted the blue that van Bruggen selected, and resited in a space she chose in the Otterlo sculpture park. It became the couple’s first collaboration (fig. 9).
Figure 9 Coosje van Bruggen and Claes Oldenburg at “Spirit of the Monument” symposium, 1992, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. Image STP 03307, property of Case Western Reserve University Archives
In 1976 van Bruggen made her first trip to the United States for the installation of Oldenburg’s first large-scale monument, the 45-foot Clothespin facing City Hall in downtown Philadelphia. During her visit she accompanied Oldenburg to the Lippincott Factory in North Haven, Connecticut, to see Batcolumn under construction. While there, she defined a gray color for the sculpture.
Requirements for work and travel kindled romantic feelings between Oldenburg and van Bruggen, which he was unable to pursue until after her divorce. The couple spent the summer of 1977 in Allegan, Michigan, from which they commuted to work on buildings to house the Mouse Museum and Ray Gun Wing in Chicago. They were married in Allegan on July 22, 1977.
In 1978 Oldenburg and van Bruggen realized that the art gallery was a confining space for displays of limited duration and decided to devote themselves to making permanent outdoor works, referred to as “large-scale projects,” or “private works in public places.” Van Bruggen moved to New York accompanied by her children, Paulus and Maartje, and the family settled in two side-by-side lower Manhattan lofts which served as their offices, studio, warehouse, and residence.
In 1982 van Bruggen participated as a member of the selection committee for Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, which included the couple’s Spitzhacke (Pickaxe) commission. Van Bruggen was the author of books and catalogues, including monographs on Bruce Nauman (1989) and John Baldessari (1990), and wrote articles and reviews for Artforum, in addition to working with Oldenburg on exhibitions and sculpture installations. The couple also coauthored several volumes on their projects over the years. Van Bruggen became an American citizen in 1993.
Germano Celant curated an extensive retrospective exhibition of Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1995, which then traveled to Los Angeles, New York, London, and Bonn.
Van Bruggen succumbed to cancer in January 2009.
3
SCULPTURAL COLLABORATIONS
For the casual reader not closely familiar with the sculptors’ artistic career, a brief overview of their public art leading to Free Stamp might be helpful. Earlier installations provide a context for the Cleveland sculpture. Although their corpus of works continued to flourish after the Cleveland project, my treatment of later works will be peripheral. Batcolumn (Chicago, 1977) merged a modern pasttime, baseball, with an ancient, revered architectural element. Because the bat has no up or down unless held, the column association was necessary to give it its enduring verticality. Umberto Eco has characterized the venerable nature of the column, which persists against the winds of time, an object of wonder with an aristocratic touch.1 He has further inventoried its aspects as a witness of vanished greatness, the mast of time casting a shadow of melancholy, as obstinate, slender, solitary, rising. For the Roman architect Vitruvius, the column was a metonym for place, such as the Roman Forum, and a signifier of the importance of location, a necessary stage set for tragedy to underscore the seriousness of a drama. In the Renaissance the column was associated with Samson and Hercules and the cardinal virtue of fortitude. Oldenburg mentioned being stimulated by Alfred Loos’s submission for the 1922 Chicago Tribune Tower competition in the shape of a Doric column. Batcolumn was thus rich with cultural and historical allusions independent of its setting, and with an architectural significance linking it to the surrounding buildings. The project was funded by the Art in Architecture Program of the General Services Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. As an early public sculpture project, Batcolumn set the stage for Free Stamp to come.
With the twenty-ton Crusoe Umbrella in Des Moines (fig. 10, 58 × 37 × 37 feet), the artists began one of their early collaborations, creating a sculpture that would quickly become identified with another American city, the Iowa state capital.2 This was followed by an even more humble subject, a split button, which became a sculpture for the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia in 1981.
Figure 10 Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Crusoe Umbrella, 1979, corten steel painted with polyurethane enamel, 33 × 37 × 56 ft. (10.1 × 11.38 × 17.1 m). Nollen Plaza, Civic Center of Greater Des Moines, Iowa. Photo by Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio.
The Roman historian Pliny noted that the
