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Fine Arts Museums Acquires Major Outdoor Sculpture by Claes Oldenburg
1/30/2004 Corridor Pin, Blue is a Gift of Bernard and Barbro Osher San Francisco, 30 January 2004--The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco has acquired Corridor Pin, Blue, a signal sculpture by Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) and Coosje van Bruggen (b. 1942). This monumental stainless steel and aluminum sculpture with blue polyurethane enamel, which measures 21' 3" x 21' 2" x 1' 4", has been installed at the Terrace Level of the Legion of Honor until the new de Young Museum is completed. At that time, it will be moved to the Osher Sculpture Garden, where it will be on view with other gifts from Bernard and Barbro Osher, including Isamu Noguchi's Untitled (1978) and Louise Nevelson's Ocean Gate (1982). Says Director Harry S. Parker III, "Thanks to the ongoing extraordinary generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Osher, Corridor Pin, Blue will play a major role in documenting the history of modernist sculpture in the Osher Sculpture Garden at the new de Young."
Corridor Pin, Blue (1999), is a significant addition to the museums' holdings of Oldenburg works, which include Ice Bag--Scale B (1971) a large indoor sculpture, and 97 prints and multiples. In Corridor Pin, Blue, the title of which is a reference to the first exhibition of this sculpture proximate to a long corridor at the Museo Correr in Venice, Italy, the viewer’s conventional expectations of a safety pin are truly "turned on its head." The scale is magnified by a factor of 250, and the pin is balanced vertically in a manner impossible to achieve with its real-life counterpart. The extended pin point is evocative of the pointer of a compass, or perhaps the extended arm of an acrobat or dancer. In a final, humorous subversion, Oldenburg plays on the very nature of the "safety" pin by creating a pin that is open and potentially dangerous, or at least expressive and pointing, rather than closed and safe. Says Timothy Anglin Burgard, the Ednah Root Curator of American Art, "By creating a safety pin that can no longer be used in practical terms, Oldenburg and van Bruggen shift the viewer’s attention away from the object’s function, and instead to its formal and sculptural properties. While the safety pin epitomizes the modernist maxim that "form follows function," it also may be viewed as an elegant minimalist sculpture that merits elevation into the realm of fine art."
Like many of Oldenburg’s and van Bruggen’s large-scale sculptures of the past decade, Corridor Pin, Blue takes as its subject a common, utilitarian household or workplace object so prosaic that it typically goes unnoticed—in fact, these objects' low profiles are often inversely proportional to their degrees of high utility. Oldenburg’s embrace of such prosaic objects may be seen as part of a long tradition of "found" objects dating back to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, bottle rack, and snow shovel and paralleled by Jasper Johns's beer cans and flashlight.
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen
Claes Oldenburg is widely acknowledged as one of the one of the most important and influential sculptors of the post-War generation. Although he is often hailed as a pioneering figure associated with the Pop Art movement, Oldenburg’s early installations and sub-sequent "soft" sculptures had an emphatically three-dimensional, hand-crafted presence that differed substantially from the two-dimensional, mass-produced commercial imagery embraced by most Pop artists. In recent years, working in partnership with the curator, critic, and art historian Coosje van Bruggen, Oldenburg has focused on the creation of large-scale public sculptures.
Born in Stockholm, Sweden, Oldenburg spent most of his childhood in the United States. After studies at Yale University and the Art Institute of Chicago, he moved to New York City in 1956, where he established an artistic reputation through a series of innovative installations and performances that engaged imagery and issues associated with American popular culture. In his most famous installation, The Store (1961), Oldenburg created a store for art, stocked with his hand-made interpretations of American pop food and objects, thus providing a witty and ironic commentary on the commodification of both American pop culture and art itself.
Oldenburg is perhaps best known for his "soft" sculptures of everyday objects, often fabricated in unconventional modern materials such as vinyl or plastic, that challenged and subverted traditional conventions regarding sculptural materials and their permanence. Beginning with the notorious Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (1969) for Yale University, Oldenburg has also created large-scale fabricated sculptures, as well as pro-posals for fantastic, monumental (and often unrealized) public monuments.
The Fine Arts Museums' Corridor Pin, Blue is San Francisco's second monumental outdoor sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. In 2002, Cupid's Span (2000), was installed in Rincon Park at the city's Embarcadero.
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