Claes Oldenburg’s Chicago

A pop art luminary and his hometown

At the corner of Madison and Jefferson in Chicago stands a 100-foot-high baseball bat, constructed in a lattice pattern from 20 tons of steel. It is the largest sculpture created by the artist Claes Oldenburg, a man from whose mind sprang any number of super-sized objects: a 45-foot tall clothespin in Philadelphia, a 29-foot-long spoon in Minneapolis. In Kansas City, you’ll find a shuttlecock the size of a steeple.

Oldenburg, who died in July 2022 at age 93, was one of pop art’s most prominent exemplars. He was also a distinctly Chicago artist, a distinction that received only scant acknowledgement in local obituaries. “C.O. equals Chicago,” wrote Oldenburg in his notebook, playfully connecting his initials to the city that nurtured him when he was young and continued to loom large in his imagination as he became a globe-trotting art world luminary.

Indeed, Oldenburg’s ties to the city went far beyond one humongous bat. Much commentary on the artist starts with his 1956 arrival in New York City, as if he had sprouted—fully formed—from the brow of abstract expressionism. But Oldenburg’s Chicago roots were deep and tangled. He was raised in the city from the age of seven, attended the Latin School through 12th grade, and (after college) returned to become a journalist at the famed City News Bureau, attend classes at the School of the Art Institute, and contribute dozens of illustrations for Chicago magazine. Even after his later move east, Chicago often served as a municipal muse for his groundbreaking body of work.

By DAVID ISAACSON

Oldenburg’s father became Swedish consul general in Chicago in 1936, and the family—toting along with them heirloom 18th-century Scandinavian crystal chandeliers and golden clocks—moved into 44 E. Bellevue (a residence that has since been replaced by a large condo building).

“When Claes arrived in Chicago,” writes art critic Barbara Rose, “he spoke no English, and communication with other children was extremely di cult. Not surprisingly, he led an even richer fantasy life than most children.”

That fantasy life was a petri dish for the adult artist’s oeuvre: “Everything I do is completely original,” Oldenburg wrote in 1966, as he was taking the New York art scene by storm. “I made it up when I was a little kid.”

The young artist, left to his own devices in his father’s o ces, engaged in elaborate, fanciful world-building; he chronicled the geography and culture of an imaginary island, which he called “Neubern,” in endless maps, models, newspapers, and even movie posters. Rose—a primary biographer of Oldenburg—asserts that, “Like the work that Oldenburg was to produce as a mature artist, Neubern was a parody of reality, providing a counterpart cosmos that paralleled the real world instead of imitating it.”

The scenery outside his third-story bedroom window provided more fodder for his imagination. The fire hydrant on the street

(which he called a “fireplug” in the vernacular of the day) proved to be a locus for drama and a cause for contemplation. “I saw firemen vengefully run their hoses through the windows of a car parked by the plug in winter, causing the car to become a solid block of ice,” he reminisced in his notebook years later. “The details of the plug give a sketch of brutality—the locked caps, their chains, the blunt construction.” In the late 60s, the fireplugs that intrigued him as a child would become the template for hard sculptures, soft sculptures, proposed monuments, and even cu links.

From third grade through high school, Oldenburg attended the private Chicago Latin School for Boys, a 15-minute walk north from that first Chicago home. He and his classmates would play baseball and stickball on the roof of the building, which is still home to the school’s pre-K through fourth grade students.

When he was in eighth grade, the yearbook reported “Claes Oldenburg insists he is misunderstood by practically all the teachers.” By his senior year, he was editor of three school publications, on the student council, and playing for the private school league champion football team.

Those were not, however, the only “extracurriculars” of Oldenburg’s high school education. He would check out Chicago’s strip joints—perhaps the same ones where another Chicagoan, a teenage Bob Fosse, had worked as a tap dancer just a couple years earlier; the burlesque spirit he encountered there would later infuse his visual aesthetic, notorious for its ribald evocations of breasts and genitalia.

Oldenburg would return to those clubs when he came back to Chicago as an adult. As his first wife and close artistic collaborator

Patty Mucha recalls, “Claes could justify what I thought was his dirty-old-man habit by using these images to make some outrageously shocking, yet beautiful drawings.”

Oldenburg went to college at Yale University, but upon graduation, he was drawn back to his hometown. He soon got a job at the City News Bureau, covering cops and courts at the legendary local wire service. (His tenure there came just after Kurt Vonnegut’s and just before Mike Royko’s.) Oldenburg’s job description spanned the mundane to the thrilling. Longtime editor Arnold “Dornie” Dornfeld recalls in his book on the Bureau, “Claes Oldenburg was terrified that he was going to get chewed out because he had to push the editor’s frozen car by hand for more than two blocks before he could get it started,” but also that Oldenburg used his father’s connections “to get into the exclusive Swedish Club on the north side, something no other reporter had been able to do, to get information on a crazed gunman who was running amok in the building.”

However, as Oldenburg said later, this kind of journalism seemed “a very unidealistic pursuit, you know, and there was no future in it. . . . So then, after about a year and a half of that, I resolved to become a professional artist.”

That impulse led Oldenburg to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he took classes on and off for a few years, painting alongside key figures of the midcentury Chicago art scene: Robert Indiana, H.C. Westermann, Robert Barnes, and Irving Petlin. Outside school he would pal around with Leon Golub, June Leaf, and George Cohen.

His most significant job in this period was at the 1950s iteration of Chicago magazine, first as staff artist, then as contributing editor. (That publication, founded by Maurice English, has no connection to the Chicago magazine of today.) From March 1953 through February 1956, Oldenburg contributed at least 33 drawings to the monthly. These are Oldenburg’s earliest professionally published works, and they have never been included in catalogs of his art or discussions of his emerging style.

Even as Oldenburg became famous for his sculptural (and eventually monumental) works, drawing—which he would define as “the accidental ability to coordinate your fantasy with your hand”—for him remained at the heart of it all. But most, if not all, of the originals of the Chicago magazine drawings were likely destroyed. “I went through my drawings about two years ago and destroyed approximately 75 percent of them,” he told an interviewer in 1965, “because I felt that whatever I had said had been re-said in a better way.”

Oldenburg’s magazine work provides tantalizing clues to his future direction as an artist. A streetscape from the February 1956 issue shows pliant, expressive buildings. A pair of headphones illustrated a 1955 article about wiretapping in Chicago. Here, in a harbinger of his future approach, he gives a certain personality to the headphones, transforming an everyday object into an amusing, anthropomorphic form.

At this time, Oldenburg had his first exhibition, showing work in the bar of Club St. Elmo, at State and Maple. The proprietor, St. Elmo Linton, delighted in both exotic cuisine (rattlesnake, rooster combs, and fried agave worms were on the menu) and the work of young artists: several Art Institute students had their first exhibitions there. Oldenburg contributed “a group of satirical drawings” inspired by a story by one of his favorite authors, Nelson Algren. The story, “The Face on the Barroom Floor,” is a witty yet horrifically violent tale that takes place “in a dingy speakeasy on the wrong side of Van Buren Street.” Brutality and humor would continue to worm their way into Oldenburg’s mature work. “I am for an art,” he would write in 1961, “that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.” We don’t know what the work exhibited at Club St. Elmo looked like, but some of Oldenburg’s caricatures for Chicago may give us a hint. goodbye Chicago you big piece of iron you hard jaw you black crusher you swell sweeping eye your brain of macadam you clunker of boxcars you eye-blackener teeth-smacker asphalt roarer goodbye

The Club St. Elmo show was the first of a half dozen Chicago-area exhibitions over the next couple of years. But in 1956, Oldenburg relocated to New York City. He later wrote a farewell poem—a rejoinder to Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago,”—to the city that had raised him and nurtured his nascent artistry. (It is reproduced in Robert Haywood’s book on Oldenburg.)

At le : These anthropomorphic headphones illustrated a 1955 article about wiretapping. At right: This early drawing appeared in Chicago in 1953, and again in 1954, for the story “Dance of Triumph.”