Shuttlecock Sphinx, Springtime

Claes Oldenburg redefined the idea of the monument through enormous reproductions of commercial and quotidian objects that are at once whimsical, irreverent, and absurd. He moved to New York after college in 1956 and quickly became a prominent figure in Happenings and performance art, but his plaster sculptures shown in 1961 at The Store, a display in his studio that parodied American consumerism, launched him to fame as a leading artist associated with the emergent Pop movement. Later that decade, Oldenburg embarked on a series of Proposed Colossal Monuments, renderings in pencil or watercolor that transformed a familiar site or geographic location through a startling sculptural intervention. By the 1970s, Oldenburg had turned to actual monumental outdoor sculptures as his primary output. Most of these are co-authored with Coosje van Bruggen, his longtime artistic collaborator and second wife.

Oldenburg and van Bruggen first represented the shuttlecock in the early 1990s, while developing a large-scale monument for the grounds of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Preparatory drawings, sketches, and plans resulted in four massive hard sculptures of shuttlecocks that look as if they have just alighted on the lawn of the museum from a cosmic game of badminton. This drawing, produced more than a decade later, shows the fanciful potential of the object to disrupt any scene. Here, an otherwise realistic depiction of a monument in springtime becomes a fantasy through the chimeric representation of a Sphinx with a shuttlecock head.