The art he made in that brief, fecund time is the focus of a two-meals-for-the-price-of-one Oldenburg feast at the Museum of Modern Art beginning on Sunday. One show, “Claes Oldenburg: The Street and the Store,” is installed on the museum’s sixth floor; the other, “Claes Oldenburg: Mouse Museum/Ray Gun Wing,” in the second-floor atrium. Together they give a good sense of his distinctive version of Pop: obstreperous, messy and rude, the equivalent of grimy mitts and a belch in MoMA’s clean white halls.
Mr. Oldenburg, who was born in Sweden in 1929 but raised in the United States, arrived in New York from Chicago in 1956. He settled on the East Village, then a sooty immigrant neighborhood filled with kitchen smells and storefront shops spilling over with cut-rate goods. He himself was spilling over with information and ideas.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/12/arts/design/claes-oldenburg-is-subject-of-2-shows-at-moma.html?pagewanted=all