93 Quotes by Claes Oldenburg

I think the Freudian impulse is in everything, so I just accept it. I don't always believe what Freud is saying but it sounds like fun.

Ox-Bow was a very free place, very open. You could do whatever you wanted to do.

I went back to the Art Institute, then spent the summer at the Ox-Bow School in Saugatuck, Michigan. That's what really awakened me. I made a lot of oil paintings and my first performance.

I had, over the years, collected things, small things, as people do, and I had put them all together and showed them in what became a building in the form of the Geometric Mouse.

I got a job as a dishwasher in Oakland, and I would draw all day. It was nice because the lady who ran the boardinghouse where I worked let me live there for nothing if I gave her some drawings every week - mostly park drawings of birds and such.

I knew I had to take my ambition more seriously, so I enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then, in the fall, I went on a tour of my own. I didn't go to New York because that was too well known for its art scene.

The art world was very small and the people got together at parties. There was less commercialism.

The right angle is one of the world's basic shapes.

You can take an object and simply put anything you want in that object, and I accessed that partly through Freudian ideas.