Since November, “Architect’s Handkerchief” (1999), Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s 12-foot-tall summary hankie sprouting from a breast pocket has waved from the street-level plaza of Lever Home, at 390 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. The sculpture’s baroque white folds evoke the creamy marble of a Bernini, voluptuous whilst its bolstered plastic can be ineffective to dab an eye fixed. It provides totally different consolation, a visible relaxation cease from the inflexible geometry unfolding round it.
Extremely, for an artist who made New York his house for almost 70 years, not one of the fanciful public sculptures like these — those for which Oldenburg is most celebrated — are on everlasting view within the metropolis. This presentation at Lever Home, a 1952 jewel of midcentury Worldwide Model, is a short lived correction, the primary of Oldenburg’s work in New York since his loss of life right here in 2022. It consists of the Gulliverian “Plantoir, Pink (Mid-Scale)” (2001-2021), and a choice of smaller sculptures and schematic drawings.
The architect of “Architect’s Handkerchief” is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the final director of the Bauhaus and religious daddy of modernist structure, whose Seagram Constructing is a transparent shot throughout Park Avenue from Lever (designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill).
Oldenburg’s affection for Mies little question developed in Chicago, the place each had first settled after emigrating from Europe (This “Architect’s Handkerchief,” from an version of three, was plucked from Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.) The Seagram Constructing is Mies’s solely contribution to the New York skyline, making the work’s placement a canny distillation of Mies’s arm’s-length embrace of New York.
Oldenburg had no such ambivalence. He moved to New York Metropolis in 1956, and his artwork shortly absorbed the town’s ecstatic cacophony. He thrilled to the East Village’s dereliction and road trash, the messy detritus of day by day life whose tactile splendors satisfied him to desert portray for sculpture.
In 1960 he cobbled collectively newspaper and cardboard he discovered within the gutters to make “The Avenue,” a weirdly charming panorama of road life. The subsequent 12 months, he opened “The Retailer,” a functioning store out of his East Second Avenue studio that offered bumpy facsimiles of day by day life: clammy painted plaster cake slices and coagulated sandwiches that by some means managed to be interesting. He declared allegiance to artwork that “accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and candy and silly as life itself.”
Oldenburg shared his contemporaries’ suspicion of postwar consumerism, however dropped at Pop Artwork an absurdist streak. The machined and mass-produced transmuted into the rumpled and lumpen, the incidental made heroic, as he wrote, “how close to can a factor come to being it and never be it.”
The presentation at Lever Home, along side Paula Cooper Gallery, which represents the Oldenburg and van Bruggen property as a single entity, is the second following Lever Home’s buy and intensive renovation by Brookfield Properties and WatermanCLARK. Oldenburg’s gloopy piles of toast would appear to be in direct opposition to Lever Home’s midcentury polish, however his issues chime right here in slyly seditious methods.
Developed in 1950 because the worldwide headquarters of the Lever Brothers cleaning soap firm, it was a locus of the pumping commodity tradition to which Pop artists responded. A number of generations later, Oldenburg’s toothbrushes and spurting tubes of toothpastes occupy the unique steel-rimmed vitrines that when (unironically) levitated Lever Brothers client merchandise like artworks. The impact is a bit like getting a John Chamberlain onto a GM manufacturing unit ground.
Lever Home’s historical past of artwork patronage started with its earlier proprietor, the true property tycoon Aby Rosen, who purchased the constructing in 1998 and for 20 years used the foyer to host exhibitions of blue-chip artwork; he additionally commissioned new work that entered its assortment. The 2 displays beneath Brookfield have responded extra to the structure than the market (Tom Sachs put a bronze Hi there Kitty statue within the plaza in 2008 — jarring however not in a great way).
The present presentation is concise, much less of a museum-length survey than an amuse bouche of Oldenburg’s profession: two monumental out of doors items and inside, two smooth sculptures that had been in Oldenburg’s studio for many years (a limp, suede string bean slithering up a metal assist column; a saw-shaped flag whose gossamer material blade diffuses the headlights of downtown site visitors); seven tabletop sculptures (a petrified pile of toast and bag of sweet from “The Retailer”); and as many drawings. But it’s sufficient to get the flavour of Oldenburg’s humor, the psychoanalytic precision with which he dismantled fashionable life’s anxieties and needs, and the intense unseriousness with which he rebuilt them.
Oldenburg’s artwork was relentlessly Freudian, channeling a latent eroticism that might get tedious (a number of gushing and engorged phalluses). However the items linked libidinal fetishes with consumerist ones, a fact whose relevance has solely inflated. Oldenburg’s artwork inflated too, dropping a few of its endearing rawness for cartoony heft, which maybe explains why many of the bigger work landed elsewhere, the place it wouldn’t be overwhelmed by New York’s architectural density, or the place there’s extra tolerance for whimsy. (It appears unlikely that New Yorkers would abide a 45-foot clothespin straddling a subway entrance, as one has in Philadelphia since 1976.)
There are sudden treasures, together with a 1962 proposal to switch 200 Park Avenue, previously the Pan Am Constructing, with an upturned Good Humor Bar, a chunk taken out of a nook to permit for the circulate of site visitors. (Unilever had acquired Good Humor the 12 months earlier than; the sketch’s inclusion right here imagines an alternate company historical past.)
However it’s “Plantoir,” an oversize gardener’s trowel, and the final out of doors work that Oldenburg and van Bruggen, his second spouse and frequent collaborator, produced earlier than her loss of life in 2009 (this model was manufactured expressly for this present), that finally ends up being probably the most poignant. It recollects Oldenburg’s public art work “Placid Civic Monument,” wherein he employed grave diggers to excavate six toes of Central Park earth and refill it a number of hours later. That work is alternately described as an early earthwork or efficiency, although largely it’s emblematic of Oldenburg’s willingness to reshape artwork into its most humane expression, to make it as plain and common as dying. Opening up a grave behind the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork can be as deadpan because it will get.
“Plantoir” is much much less disruptive, plunged cheerily into its personal plinth. It’s positioned close to the constructing’s white marble planter that leaks by way of a glass wall and into the foyer, teasing out the public-private, artwork and commerce tensions of Oldenburg’s artwork, and will get at why the presentation finally succeeds.
Company engagement with artwork is normally a wan try at picture laundering or tax write-off. Brookfield Properties, which is greatest identified for growing and working purchasing malls, has employed the artwork adviser Jacob King to prepare considerate commissions and momentary exhibitions. (King organized a refined show of labor by Ellsworth Kelly final 12 months right here.) It most likely helps that Bruce Flatt, Brookfield’s chief govt, and his spouse, Lonti Ebers, are collectors, and that Ebers is a trustee of MoMA.
Brookfield absolutely has extra assets than common, and company charitableness isn’t utterly benevolent. However the different — permitting artwork to molder, unseen, in non-public collections or languish in storage, is worse. Extra essential, the presentation fulfills Oldenburg’s necessities for artwork “that does one thing apart from sit on its ass in a museum.” That’s more durable than it sounds.
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen
By way of November 2025, 390 Park Avenue, Manhattan; brookfieldproperties.com.
