Detail of Pastry Case I by Oldenburg in the Museum of Modern Art, March 2010

Claes Oldenburg
Pastry Case, I
1961-62

“I work with very simple things that I come across while walking to work,” Oldenburg explained in 1964, “such as a certain kind of pastry . . . or certain kinds of displays or presentations and advertisements that I naturally come across as part of the urban landscape.” Pastry Case, I replicates just this sort of everyday sighting. The desserts are presented for the viewer’s delectation on real dishes, heightening the tension between the tempting evocation of edible goods and their obvious artifice. In a 1969 interview, Oldenburg described this tension as a way of “frustrating expectations”: “The food, of course, can’t really be eaten, so that it’s an imaginary activity which emphasizes the fact that it is, after all, not realthat it’s art, whatever that strange thing is of doing something only for itself rather than for function.”

Gallery label from Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store, April 14–August 5, 2013.


Medium
Burlap and muslin soaked in plaster, painted with enamel,
metal bowls, and ceramic plates in glass-and-metal case
Dimensions
20 3/4 x 30 1/8 x 14 3/4" (52.7 x 76.5 x 37.3 cm)
Credit
The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection
Object number
639.1967.a-dd
Copyright
© 2024 Claes Oldenburg
Department
Painting and Sculpture

Text from: www.moma.org/collection/works/81721