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Lot Essay
In Stockinged Thighs Framed by Skirt, Claes Oldenburg audaciously appropriates one of modern visual culture’s most provocative tropes—the voyeuristic glimpse beneath a woman's skirt—transforming it into a knowing, humorous meditation on the hegemony of consumer culture. Displayed at his immersive installation The Store in 1961, Stockinged Thighs Framed by Skirt showcases a pair of legs clad in emerald stockings against the underside of a bright red skirt. Oldenburg constructed the work from armatures of chicken wire overlaid with plaster-soaked canvas, then coated it with enamel paint straight from the can to give the piece a bright, commercial finish. The overall effect not only evokes commercial pinup photos and advertisements, but also Egon Schiele’s scantily clad and stockinged models, and Toulouse-Lautrec's sensuous, dynamic depictions of his favorite muse, actress Marcelle Lender.
The present work was one of the many audacious sculptures on view at The Store (1961), a space Oldenburg filled with plaster-reliefs and three-dimensional depictions of clothing and food found in his Lower East Side neighborhood. Using this area as a backdrop for his subversion of modern excess, The Store echoes the volatile and seductive scenes of Otto Dix’s 1928 triptych Metropolis, a display of the pleasures and pitfalls of modern urban life. A provocative early exemplar of Oldenburg’s radical approach to commodity culture and a rare sculptural treatment of the human form within his Store oeuvre, Stockinged Thighs Framed by Skirt exemplifies his ability to transform the vulgar into the visually arresting.
The Store opened in December 1961 at 107 East Second Street, a rented storefront that doubled as Oldenburg’s studio. The project conflated two disparate economies: the sale of cheap merchandise and the sale of so-called “high” art. Every work was available for purchase, priced from $21.79 to $499.99, enacting what Oldenburg described as “the protection of art through reversals and disguises. From the bourgeois, from commercialism, from rivalry, from all the forces that might destroy art.” (C. Oldenburg quoted in “The Ray Gun Manufacturing Company” in Claes Oldenburg, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970, p. 64). Stockinged Thighs Framed by Skirt embodies Oldenburg’s obsession with the dialectical tensions central to modern life: low-brow commodities versus luxury goods, eroticism versus banality, the allure of the advertisement versus the materiality of hand-crafted goods.
For Oldenburg, these tensions find their fullest expression in the oversaturated material culture of urban life. By performing an inversion of consumer culture—presenting commonplace and crude material culture as high-art commodities—The Store exposed both the arbitrary nature of market value and its totalizing dominance—nothing, even art, is immune from commodification. At once sensuous and cerebral, crude and challenging, The Store sculptures encapsulate Oldenburg’s declaration: “I am involved with vulgar art, partly with its discovery and partly with its transformation” (C. Oldenburg quoted in “The Ray Gun Manufacturing Company” in Claes Oldenburg, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York, p. 64).
Rejecting the style of Abstract Expressionism that dominated postwar American art, Oldenburg turned instead to the quotidian objects of his urban landscape as pressure points that when activated, could reveal deeper, more fundamental elements of human experiences that consumer culture often obfuscates. It is his signature combination of humor, severity, and insight that has secured Oldenburg’s position not just as a pillar of Pop Art, but as a defining force in the visual language of contemporary culture.
The present work was one of the many audacious sculptures on view at The Store (1961), a space Oldenburg filled with plaster-reliefs and three-dimensional depictions of clothing and food found in his Lower East Side neighborhood. Using this area as a backdrop for his subversion of modern excess, The Store echoes the volatile and seductive scenes of Otto Dix’s 1928 triptych Metropolis, a display of the pleasures and pitfalls of modern urban life. A provocative early exemplar of Oldenburg’s radical approach to commodity culture and a rare sculptural treatment of the human form within his Store oeuvre, Stockinged Thighs Framed by Skirt exemplifies his ability to transform the vulgar into the visually arresting.
The Store opened in December 1961 at 107 East Second Street, a rented storefront that doubled as Oldenburg’s studio. The project conflated two disparate economies: the sale of cheap merchandise and the sale of so-called “high” art. Every work was available for purchase, priced from $21.79 to $499.99, enacting what Oldenburg described as “the protection of art through reversals and disguises. From the bourgeois, from commercialism, from rivalry, from all the forces that might destroy art.” (C. Oldenburg quoted in “The Ray Gun Manufacturing Company” in Claes Oldenburg, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970, p. 64). Stockinged Thighs Framed by Skirt embodies Oldenburg’s obsession with the dialectical tensions central to modern life: low-brow commodities versus luxury goods, eroticism versus banality, the allure of the advertisement versus the materiality of hand-crafted goods.
For Oldenburg, these tensions find their fullest expression in the oversaturated material culture of urban life. By performing an inversion of consumer culture—presenting commonplace and crude material culture as high-art commodities—The Store exposed both the arbitrary nature of market value and its totalizing dominance—nothing, even art, is immune from commodification. At once sensuous and cerebral, crude and challenging, The Store sculptures encapsulate Oldenburg’s declaration: “I am involved with vulgar art, partly with its discovery and partly with its transformation” (C. Oldenburg quoted in “The Ray Gun Manufacturing Company” in Claes Oldenburg, exh. cat. Museum of Modern Art, New York, p. 64).
Rejecting the style of Abstract Expressionism that dominated postwar American art, Oldenburg turned instead to the quotidian objects of his urban landscape as pressure points that when activated, could reveal deeper, more fundamental elements of human experiences that consumer culture often obfuscates. It is his signature combination of humor, severity, and insight that has secured Oldenburg’s position not just as a pillar of Pop Art, but as a defining force in the visual language of contemporary culture.