Claes Oldenburg

The drama begins with a Yuletide gathering in an eerie country retreat that's rumored to be haunted. There, Dickens and his friends, including acclaimed authors Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins, take on the task of finding evidence of a supernatural presence in the house. When they reconvene at a Twelfth Night feast to review their findings, what will their stories reveal?

In 1957-58, after he moved to New York's Lower East Side, Claes Oldenburg began making collages he has described as "mostly done in an uncontrolled and intuitive dream mode." Made from found, printed imagery, the Strange Eggs are enigmatic, surrealistic, and vastly different from the Pop art of the 1960s for which he soon became famous. Inspired by the original avant-garde collage artists, these works are characterized by self-contained forms or "eggs" which the artist made by melding cut fragments of photographic reproductions. While many of the pieces are unrecognizable, within the amalgamations some original references are discernible: a piece of pie, the hind leg of a horse, the creased skin of a clenched first, and the texture of concrete. These eighteen collages were first shown in their entirety at the Menil Collection in 2012 and are being published here for the first time, close to actual size.

Large-scale quasi catalogue raisonné of drawing and prints by Claes Oldenburg executed between 1958 - 1967. Contains introduction and commentary by Gene Baro, chronology, and raisonné for drawings and prints. While, in fact, this book purports to be a raisonné, and goes to great lengths to document Oldenburg's drawings, it lacks documentation of a large number of drawings executed within the period. However, this book is an extremely valuable document in that it lavishly reproduces a large number of the artist's works and indexes 369 drawings and 9 prints.