Claes Oldenburg

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Overview

Profile of the American sculptor Claes Oldenburg. Although born in Sweden, he was brought up in the USA and moved to New York in the late 1950s. Contemporaries Jim Dine, Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist reminisce about their experiences with the artist. Art dealer Arne Glimcher, museum director Tom Krens, and critic Hilton Kramer, among others, discuss with the writer Coosje van Bruggen, to whom the artist is married, the development of Oldenburg's career from the early cardboard and plaster pieces to the large-scale public works executed over the past twenty years. Oldenburg is filmed drawing in the couple's Manhattan studio, while van Bruggen and Oldenburg together retrace the conceptualisation of a recent urban project, the `Torn Notebook'. The latter part of the programme is devoted to the complex installation of the nine-metre long `Giant Soft Shuttlecock' in the Guggenheim Museum in New York in October 1995, for the exhibition entitled `Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology'.