The Art Economist

Claes Oldenburg - The Virtuoso of Public Sculpture
November 2011 • cover story
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen and the making of public monuments for over three decades.

"I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical; that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum." Thus wrote Claes Oldenburg in a poetical manifesto in 1961, when he had just embarked on experimentalist projects like The Street and The Store that would later prove so fundamental to the evolution of Pop art. And here he was half a century later, talking excitedly on the phone about the installation of his latest large-scale monument, "Paint Torch," commissioned by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia for its campus.

The Brilliance of Tony Cragg
September 2011
A conversation with this acclaimed sculptor, who also is showing at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Louvre and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.