Digging Into Claes Oldenburg’s Visual Feast

“I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all,” wrote Claes Oldenburg in 1961, six decades before his death on Monday. “I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap and still comes out on top.” In December of that year, he rented as his studio a storefront at 107 East Second Street in the funky East Village section of New York. In it, he made and displayed hand-painted, expressionistically sloppy, painted plaster nonreplicas of common objects—wristwatches, slabs of meat, canvas sneakers, sundaes—one could buy in the neighborhood. Oldenburg called his premises “The Store,” perhaps a swipe at the city’s uptown art galleries, which had gotten slick and pretentious.