Claes Oldenburg

The building is nondescript, a cryptic gray and brown covered with sprayed black graffiti, runny and indecipherable - a city front if there ever was one. Inside, up a couple of long flights of stairs, an unsettling experience waits, poised like a ghost. Perched on shelves and splayed out along the floor, rising from small pedestals and lolling on tables, old and unexpected friends greet a visitor. In a corner, Philadelphia's Clothespin. Across the room lies Split Button from the University of Pennsylvania campus.

It dangled high in the air, a connector seeking a connection, before slowly being lowered into the waiting earth. At 11:45 Wednesday morning, the Philadelphia Museum of Art was at last plugged in. After hours of maneuvering and digging and pondering, the museum installed the latest addition to its outdoor sculpture garden, a gift from the collector and philanthropist David Pincus - Claes Oldenburg's Giant Three-Way Plug, Scale A ...

A light-filled paintbrush angling more than 50 feet into the air and thrusting its flaglike bristles toward Broad Street will be created by sculptor Claes Oldenburg to mark a new plaza planned by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. At a media gathering Thursday, Oldenburg said he wanted to construct "an object that in some way relates to the site," a closed-off block of Cherry Street from Broad to 15th Street and between the academy's two buildings - the Hamilton Building on the north and the historic, Frank Furness-designed museum building to the south.

Regarding the state of public art as expounded in "The public views of Claes Oldenburg" (Nov. 21), wouldn't it be nice if public art were a little more useful, or at least accessible? Oldenburg's "Clothespin" is a great conversation piece and a fun landmark, but where can a visitor to Penn Center Square park a bicycle or sit near the sculpture? Most new buildings in Philadelphia go up without these two considerations in mind. I have a suggestion for the committees advising the city's art program: How about having a few public sculptures (or front-lobby murals)

PICTURED at right is our suggestion for one piece of public art that would be fitting for the outside of the new Phillies and Eagles stadiums. It's by one of Philadelphia's favorite artists, Claes Oldenburg, creator of "Clothespin," that iconic sculpture in Center City. This piece is called "Soft Screw. " As documented by Don Russell in yesterday's Daily News, the public, which is heavily bankrolling the construction of our new $1 billion in stadiums, has been shut out of the selection or approval of the public art that will grace the grounds of those new playing fields.

You spill your wastebasket onto the floor. And what have you got? A work of art, that's what. If you find that hard to believe, check out the exhibit titled "Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp: In Resonance" opening Thursday at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. One work in that exhibit consists of 117 discarded items, including postcards, dry-cleaning receipts and assorted scraps that were piled into a box. As it happens, these scraps belonged...

Ever give much thought to a clothespin? A button? A three-way plug? They make our lives easier. They're useful, durable goods we take for granted. But objets d'art? Only in the eyes of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. These sculptors make the ordinary extraordinary by reversing visual polarity and tampering with physics. Tiny becomes huge; hard becomes pliable. What we know becomes something else. By converting everyday objects into outdoor sculpture, this team shattered the convention of monument as a bronze man on a horse.

Claes Oldenburg, the 81-year-old sculptor whose iconic Clothespin , installed in 1976, changed the face of 15th and Market Streets and the direction of Philadelphia public art, has been selected to create another work for an area north of City Hall. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has announced that a new Oldenburg will rise over what the academy has dubbed Lenfest Plaza, a new space carved out of closed-off Cherry Street between Broad and 15th Streets. The plaza will serve to link the academy's two major buildings - the ornate Frank Furness-designed museum on the south side of Cherry Street, and the straitlaced Hamilton Building of gallery, administrative and studio spaces on the north side.

The man who brought Philadelphia the Clothespin sculpture in 1976 sat in the shade of the Convention Center Saturday as his latest work, a 12,000-pound uplifted paintbrush, came together across Broad Street. Now 82, Claes Oldenburg watched as two men in cherry pickers delicately maneuvered the orange bristled end of the brush, which was suspended from a crane, onto its angled handle. No one had been able to try this in the shop in California where Paint Torch was made, and Oldenburg knew it would be "very, very tricky.

Jack L. Wolgin, the man who commissioned the iconic Clothespin sculpture across from City Hall, once again is poised to make his mark on the city's arts landscape, this time by endowing an unprecedented fine-arts prize through Temple University's Tyler School of Art. Officials at Tyler said the $3.7 million gift from Wolgin, 92, will create the world's largest prize solely for fine artists, an annual $150,000 juried award to be known as the...

Lenfest Plaza, created by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from a half-block of Cherry Street west of Broad, can be a cheerless place at this time of year. Not much sunlight can penetrate the breezy defile, squeezed between the Academy's Furness landmark and the taller Hamilton building. Perhaps spring and summer will soften the ambience. For now, two pieces of public art animate the plaza somewhat. At the Broad Street end, Claes Oldenburg's giant paintbrush, which serves as a signpost for the school and museum, adds a touch of color and whimsy.

Four weeks ago, October began with the dedication of Claes Oldenburg's latest contribution to the city's outdoor art scene: the 51-foot-high paintbrush in Lenfest Plaza across from the new Broad Street entrance of the Convention Center that effectively helped reconfigure the center from an Arch Street structure to one fronting the Avenue of the Arts. November will bring an event focusing on another outdoor artwork by Oldenburg that reconfigured a public space: the Clothespin - specifically, the sale of a 4-foot-high model of it from the art collection of the late Jack Wolgin.

The man who brought Philadelphia the Clothespin sculpture in 1976 sat in the shade of the Convention Center Saturday as his latest work, a 12,000-pound uplifted paintbrush, came together across Broad Street. Now 82, Claes Oldenburg watched as two men in cherry pickers delicately maneuvered the orange bristled end of the brush, which was suspended from a crane, onto its angled handle. No one had been able to try this in the shop in California where Paint Torch was made, and Oldenburg knew it would be "very, very tricky.

It dangled high in the air, a connector seeking a connection, before slowly being lowered into the waiting earth. At 11:45 Wednesday morning, the Philadelphia Museum of Art was at last plugged in. After hours of maneuvering and digging and pondering, the museum installed the latest addition to its outdoor sculpture garden, a gift from the collector and philanthropist David Pincus - Claes Oldenburg's Giant Three-Way Plug, Scale A ...

A light-filled paintbrush angling more than 50 feet into the air and thrusting its flaglike bristles toward Broad Street will be created by sculptor Claes Oldenburg to mark a new plaza planned by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. At a media gathering Thursday, Oldenburg said he wanted to construct "an object that in some way relates to the site," a closed-off block of Cherry Street from Broad to 15th Street and between the academy's two buildings - the Hamilton Building on the north and the historic, Frank Furness-designed museum building to the south.

A light-filled paintbrush angling more than 50 feet into the air and thrusting its flaglike bristles toward Broad Street will be created by sculptor Claes Oldenburg to mark a new plaza planned by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. At a press gathering Thursday, Oldenburg said he wanted to construct "an object that in some way relates to the site," a closed-off block of Cherry Street from Broad to 15th Street and between the academy's two buildings - the Hamilton Building on the north and the historic Frank Furness-designed museum bulding to the south.

Claes Oldenburg, the 81-year-old sculptor whose iconic Clothespin , installed in 1976, changed the face of 15th and Market Streets and the direction of Philadelphia public art, has been selected to create another work for an area north of City Hall. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has announced that a new Oldenburg will rise over what the academy has dubbed Lenfest Plaza, a new space carved out of closed-off Cherry Street between Broad and 15th Streets. The plaza will serve to link the academy's two major buildings - the ornate Frank Furness-designed museum on the south side of Cherry Street, and the straitlaced Hamilton Building of gallery, administrative and studio spaces on the north side.

For more than two decades, they've been out of public view, feared lost, feared destroyed, feared - at the least - grotesquely faded or damaged. But from a cluster of nondescript plastic tubs stuck in an out-of-the-way storage room in the bowels of a Center City office tower, they were ferreted out at last, still bright and essentially unmarred. And now, for the first time since the mid-1980s, the vanished Alexander Calder banners - part of one of the greatest public art legacies in Philadelphia history - will be on public view until March at the Central Branch of the Free Library on Logan Square.

Jack L. Wolgin, the man who commissioned the iconic Clothespin sculpture across from City Hall, once again is poised to make his mark on the city's arts landscape, this time by endowing an unprecedented fine-arts prize through Temple University's Tyler School of Art. Officials at Tyler said the $3.7 million gift from Wolgin, 92, will create the world's largest prize solely for fine artists, an annual $150,000 juried award to be known as the...

PICTURED at right is our suggestion for one piece of public art that would be fitting for the outside of the new Phillies and Eagles stadiums. It's by one of Philadelphia's favorite artists, Claes Oldenburg, creator of "Clothespin," that iconic sculpture in Center City. This piece is called "Soft Screw. " As documented by Don Russell in yesterday's Daily News, the public, which is heavily bankrolling the construction of our new $1 billion in stadiums, has been shut out of the selection or approval of the public art that will grace the grounds of those new playing fields.