CLAES OLDENBURG, Figure & Phallus II 1975

Claes Oldenburg

Figure & Phallus II , 1975
Etching on Wookey Hole hand-made paper
25 × 20 inches
Edition of 60

Perhaps you know Claes Oldenburg as the artist who created massive clothespins and spark plugs - elevating ordinary household objects to fine art. Or, if you're from the Midwest, you probably know him as the maker of Spoonbridge and Cherry - the piece at the Walker that also became the symbol of a city.  If so, you may be shocked to discover how fertile Oldenburg's sexual imagination was, to put it euphamistically. Richard Morphet, in writing about Oldenburg's erotic drawings from the 1970s, upon which this etching was based, wrote the following:

"These fantasy drawings have an early precedent in Oldenburg's schooldays when his marked facility in drawing enabled him to give pictorial form to erotic activities that interested him and his fellow students but which were forgidden subject matter....the drawings as a whole evoke something of the extraordinary range of states of mind which sexual experience can open up, from happy innocence to disturbing violence, from comedy to dejection, from ritualism to exuberant vitality. Some of the images, especially those evoking a trapped, burdened state, are positively tragic....At the heart of the erotic fantasy drawings is a central theme of all of Oldenburg's work, metamorphosis."

This makes a terrific and very X-rated gift!

SIGNATURE

signed, dated and numbered from the limited edition of 60 on the recto (front).

LITERATURE

Catalogue Raisonne: Richard H. Axsom, David Platzker