It comes as no surprise that an expert draftsman such as Claes Oldenburg was put to work drawing erotic drawings for his classmates as a schoolboy. Proving himself exceedingly skilled at illustrating sexual fantasies, Oldenburg then dabbled in erotic collages made by fusing the bodies of fashion models and pin up girls.
The erotic drawings presented here were produced in brief bursts in the 1960s and 1970s while the artist was travelling. Almost exclusively executed in hotels, the works evince the “sense of open, unrestricted possibility” offered by anonymity in interchangeable rooms.[1] Oldenburg’s erotic fantasies were executed with a combination of startlingly explicit and imaginative sexual acts combined with scholarly art historical references that range from Watteau to Medusa and the Sphinx. Elsewhere, Oldenburg’s favorite household objects such as vacuum cleaners and telephones are animated and imbued with sexual intent.
The drawings are complemented by Prick Leg, a soft sculpture in red vinyl with a suggestively phallic form, complete with canvas strap. Oldenburg wore the sculpture on one leg like an enormous boot in performances and Happenings, bringing his surreal drawings to life.
[1] Richard Morphet, "Oldenburg's Erotic Fantasy Drawings," in Claes Oldenburg: An Exhibition of Recent Erotic Fantasy Drawings (London: The Mayor Gallery, 1975).
“With an inventive originality in which, as in so much of his work, humour and horror are interdependent, mutual metamorphosis is effected between the penis and, among other things, tennis racquets, vacuum cleaners, hairs, noses, telephones and a mermaid's tail.”
–– Richard Morphet, 1975
" ... I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical ... 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 ... I am for the art of sweat that develops between crossed legs ... for the majestic art of dog-turds, rising like cathedrals ... "
–– Claes Oldenburg, 1961. Published in Store Days, 1967, and reprinted in the catalogue of Arts Council of Great Britain retrospective, Tate Gallery, London, 1970.
Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929, Stockholm, d. 2022, New York) moved to New York City in 1956, where he established himself as a pivotal figure in American art. Oldenburg’s initial interest in Happenings, performance art, and installation—including such seminal works as The Street (1960) and The Store (1961)—soon evolved into a concentration on single sculptures. Working with ordinary, everyday objects, he went on to develop “soft” sculpture and fantastic proposals for civic monuments. In 1969, Oldenburg took up fabrication on a large scale with Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks installed on the Yale University campus. From 1976 until 2009 he worked in partnership with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, executing countless large-scale projects for various public settings around the world. Oldenburg was honored with a one-person exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1969, and with a retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1995. His work is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
