Soft and Seditious, Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen Take Manhattan

Since November, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s “Architect’s Handkerchief” (1999), a 12-foot-tall abstract handkerchief that emerges from a breast pocket, has flown from the street-level Lever House plaza at 390 Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The sculpture’s baroque white folds evoke the creamy marble of Bernini, voluptuous even if its reinforced plastic would be useless to the eye. It offers a different comfort, a visual break from the rigid geometry that unfolds around it.

Incredibly, for an artist who made New York his home for nearly 70 years, none of the fantastic public sculptures like these – the ones Oldenburg is most famous for – are on permanent display in the city. This presentation at Lever House, a 1952 Mid-Century International Style gem, is a temporary fix, Oldenburg’s first work in New York after his death here in 2022. Includes Gulliver’s “Plantoir, Red (Mid-Scale)” (2001 -2021) , and a selection of smaller sculptures and schematic drawings.

The architect of the “Architect’s handkerchief” is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the last director of the Bauhaus and the spiritual father of modernist architecture, whose Seagram building is not far from Lever across Park Avenue (designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill).

Oldenburg’s affection for Mies undoubtedly developed in Chicago, where both first settled after emigrating from Europe. (This “Architect’s Handkerchief,” in three editions, was taken from Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.) The Seagram Building is Mies’ only contribution to the New York skyline, making the work’s placement a deft distillation of Mies’ outstretched embrace of New York.

Oldenburg had no such ambivalence. He moved to New York in 1956, and his art quickly absorbed the city’s ecstatic cacophony. He was enthralled by the East Village’s neglect and street trash, the untidy refuse of everyday life whose tactile opulence convinced him to abandon painting for sculpture.

In 1960, he combined newspapers and cardboard he found in gutters to create “The Street,” an oddly charming panorama of street life. The following year, he opened “The Store,” a functional store out of his studio on East Second Street that sold ragged facsimiles of everyday life: tacky painted plaster slices of cake and curdled sandwiches that somehow managed to appeal. He declared his devotion to an art that “builds up and spits and drips, and is as heavy and rough and dull and sweet and stupid as life itself.”

Oldenburg shared his contemporaries’ suspicion of post-war consumerism, but he brought a streak of absurdity to pop art. The machine-made and mass-produced has become crumpled and lumpen, accidentally heroic, as he wrote, “how close something comes to being that and not being that.”

The presentation at Lever House, in association with Paula Cooper Gallery, which represents the Oldenburg and van Bruggen estate as a whole, is the second following the purchase of Lever House and extensive renovation by Brookfield Properties and WatermanCLARK. Oldenburg’s dreary stacks of toast seem in direct contrast to the mid-century genteelness of Lever House, but his concerns here resonate in slyly rebellious ways.

Developed in 1950 as the international headquarters of soap company Lever Brothers, it was the site of a commodity-pumping culture to which pop artists responded. Several generations later, Oldenburg toothbrushes and squirt tubes of toothpaste occupy the original steel-framed display cases that once (unironically) floated Lever Brothers consumer products like works of art. The effect is like bringing John Chamberlain into the GM factory.

Lever House’s art patronage history began with its previous owner, real estate tycoon Aby Rosen, who purchased the building in 1998 and used the lobby to host blue art exhibitions for 20 years; he also commissioned new works that entered his collection. The two presentations under Brookfield responded more to the architecture than to the market (Tom Sachs placed a bronze statue of Hello Kitty in the square in 2008 — disturbing, but not in a good way).

The current presentation is concise, less like a museum overview than an entertaining sequence of Oldenburg’s career: two monumental exterior works and an interior, two soft sculptures that have been in Oldenburg’s studio for decades (a limp grain of suede slides across a steel plate support pole; a saw-shaped flag whose blade of cobweb fabric scatters traffic lights in the center of the city); seven table sculptures (a petrified pile of toast and a bag of sweets from “The Store”); and as many drawings as possible. Nevertheless, it is enough to feel the taste of Oldenburg’s humor, the psychoanalytic precision with which he dismantled contemporary life anxieties and desires, and the serious frivolity with which he rebuilt them.

Oldenburg’s art was unrelentingly Freudian, channeling a latent eroticism that could become tiresome (lots of gushing and tense phalluses). But parts connected libidinal fetishes with consumerism, a truth whose relevance is only inflated. Oldenburg’s art has also bloated, losing some of its endearing rawness for the weight of caricature, which perhaps explains why most of the larger works landed elsewhere, where they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by the architectural density of New York or where there’s more tolerance for whimsy. (It seems unlikely that New Yorkers would put up with a 45-foot clothespin at the subway entrance, as has been the case in Philadelphia since 1976.)

There are unexpected treasures, including a 1962 proposal to replace 200 Park Avenue, the former Pan Am building, with a flipped Good Humor Bar, a corner joint taken out to allow traffic flow. (Unilever had bought Good Humor the year before; the inclusion of the sketch here imagines an alternate corporate history.)

But it is “Plantoir,” a giant garden trowel and the last outdoor work that Oldenburg and van Bruggen, his second wife and frequent collaborator, produced before her death in 2009 (this version was produced specifically for this exhibition), that ends most poignantly. It’s reminiscent of Oldenburg’s public art work “Placid Civic Monument,” in which he hired grave diggers to dig up six feet of Central Park soil and refill it a few hours later. This work has been alternately described as early earthwork or performance art, although it is mostly symbolic of Oldenburg’s willingness to reshape art into its most humane expression, to make it as simple and universal as dying. The opening of the grave behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art is also insignificant.

“Plantoir” is far less destructive, cheerfully immersed in its own pedestal. It is placed near a white marble planter in a building that seeps through a glass wall into the lobby, evoking the tension between public and private, art and commerce of Oldenburg’s art, and reveals why the presentation ultimately succeeded.

Corporate engagement with art is usually a feeble attempt at image washing or tax write-offs. Brookfield Properties, which is best known for developing and managing shopping centers, has engaged art consultant Jacob King to curate thoughtful commissions and temporary exhibitions. (King organized a subtle exhibition of Ellsworth Kelly’s work here last year.) It probably helps that Brookfield CEO Bruce Flatt and his wife, Lonti Ebers, are collectors and that Ebers is a MoMA trustee.

Brookfield certainly has more resources than average, and corporate charity is rarely entirely benevolent. But the alternative—letting art thrive, unseen, in private collections or languish in storage—is worse. More importantly, the presentation fulfills Oldenburg’s requirements for art “that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.” It’s harder than it sounds.

Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen

Until November 2025, 390 Park Avenue, Manhattan; brookfieldproperties.com.