It might have been a coffee cup or a roller skate. It certainly wasn’t going to be a football.
Instead, after a drive from Kansas City to Lincoln, and much deliberation, the sculpture Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen created for the Sheldon Museum of Art became a spiral notebook that, like Oldenburg’s own sketchbooks, was ripped in half, with pages scattering to the wind.
“He was working on a commission in Kansas City and came up to the campus,” said George Neubert, Sheldon’s director in the early ’90s. “Quite frankly, he was extremely impressed by what we had done and, after the tour, said, ‘I’d like to be part of this collection.’ Then he chose the site, right on the edge of campus, very purposefully. He wanted to interact with the community."
Titled “Torn Notebook,” the monumental sculpture was installed in a newly developed small park at 12th and Q streets — the intersection between the city and the university campus.
“I think our sculpture is very often in an urban context and relates to urban events,” Oldenburg told me a week before the sculpture was unveiled in 1996. “For example, you can imagine blowing papers on a city street that would relate to this sculpture or perhaps the movement of traffic. It is true that it’s kind of a city sculpture.
“But it's also referring to the university in the sense that it’s a notebook and a textbook and it stresses that side of the university, the textual side, rather than any of the other things the university is known for. It’s a book, after all, a book that records thought and so on. For that reason, it’s appropriate, we think, for a university site.”
Oldenburg died Monday at 93, leaving behind a legacy that changed the nature of public art around the world.
“The way he transformed public art was so exciting, unparalleled at that point,” Neubert said. “He created a new context, new imagery for public art.”
The son of a diplomat who in 1936 was appointed Swedish consul general in Chicago, Oldenburg grew up there and attended the Latin School of Chicago. He studied literature and art history at Yale University before returning to the Midwest to study at the Art Institute of Chicago and draw comic strips for the City News Bureau of Chicago.
It is likely that Oldenburg’s affinity for the Midwest led not only to “Torn Notebook” being in Lincoln – he told me that he was drawn to Nebraska by its geography – but the placement of some of his most iconic works in the region – “Bat Column” in Chicago, “Shuttlecocks” at Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, “Crusoe Umbrella” and “Plantoir” in Des Moines and “Spoonbridge and Cherry” in Minneapolis.
Oldenburg’s career began in the late 1950s as part of the New York art scene, where he embraced the “Happenings” of the era and began creating small sculptures of everyday items that he presented in installations like 1961’s “The Store.”
The small plaster pieces, over the course of the decade, transformed in large “Soft” sculptures of hamburgers, ice cream cones and, in the case of a 1969 object Neubert acquired for Sheldon’s collection, a “Soft Drum Set.”
Then came the monumental sculptures that drew on Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades,” which turned common manufactured objects like a stool and bicycle wheel into art objects. But Oldenburg’s pieces were all specifically created, not manufactured.
Oldenburg’s approach to the combination of common objects with sculpture made him one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century.
“Oldenburg brought a number of different things to the game,” said Lincoln multi-disciplinary artist Charley Friedman. “He brought a sense of humor through the lens of capitalism. He created an ironic distance with that. He used everyday items, but he changed the scale of them. Scale is always part of sculpture, but it’s usually one-to-one. He exaggerated that. In American culture, we ‘Big Gulp’ everything. In the ‘60s, he realized that ‘Big Gulp’ was part of the American language and brought it into his work.”
Oldenburg was also one of the first sculptors to collaborate with those who fabricated his work.
In doing so, “he gave permission to other artists, Jeff Koons is one, Michael Heizer, Charles Ray,” Friedman said. ”Even me, for sure, there’s Oldenburg in my works.”
“Torn Notebook” is one of the more than 40 sculptures that were collaborations between Oldenburg and van Bruggen, a Dutch writer and curator who he married in 1977. She died from breast cancer in 2007.
“I think it’s one of their most successful in many ways,” Neubert said. “There’s no question Claes and Coosje had a special relationship. But in many ways, ‘Torn Notebook’ reflects both of them more than many of their other pieces. The notes she took on the drive and in Lincoln are reflected in the piece. It is really a successful collaboration.”
It is also, arguably, the most iconic and popular monumental sculpture in Lincoln and will likely remain so for decades to come.