SFMOMA, Part 32: Floor 2, 1900 to Now. Funeral Heart (Claes Oldenburg, 1961).
There is a heart on Floor 2, and it is five feet tall, and nobody is buying it flowers.
Claes Oldenburg's Funeral Heart hangs in the 1900 to Now galleries like a valentine that wandered into a wake: a heart, 57 inches high, built out of muslin soaked in plaster over a wire frame and painted with enamel — the same homely, hardware-store method Oldenburg used for everything in 1961, from blueberry pies to men's jackets to two loaves of bread, one cut. It is wall-mounted, a relief, the heart swollen out of the surface at you. The title does half the work. Not a heart. A funeral heart. Whatever this organ is supposed to pump, it is pumping it at a memorial service.
Stand in front of it and the first sensation is wrongness at the scale. A heart is an interior thing, fist-sized, hidden. At five feet tall it becomes architecture — a monument you could walk into if it were hollow. Which, in a way, is the entire Oldenburg argument in a single object: take the thing you know by heart (pun intended, the man would approve), change the size, and watch the meaning change with it. He would spend the next sixty years doing exactly this to hamburgers, clothespins, baseball bats, and typewriter erasers. Funeral Heart is the early, plaster version of the trick, made the year before he started sewing the soft ones. It is funny and it is not funny at all. That is the Oldenburg register, and he never left it.
Claes Oldenburg made Funeral Heart in 1961 — muslin soaked in plaster over a wire frame, painted with enamel, 57 × 39 3/4 × 5 1/2 inches. It was acquired by SFMOMA in 1992 as a gift of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and it is on view on Floor 2 as part of 1900 to Now: SFMOMA's Collection. The museum is at 151 Third Street; entry is included with general admission.
The easy reading is: pop art valentine, plaster heart, love commodified, The Store selling feelings by the pound. But the subject is sharper than that. Funeral Heart is not about love. It is about the year 1961 — the year Oldenburg turned his studio into a store, the year he decided that art could be merchandise and merchandise could be art, and the year American consumer culture learned to see itself in a mirror made of plaster. The heart is not celebrating romance. It is burying it, tenderly, in enamel.
1929–1959: Stockholm to the Bowery
Claes Oldenburg was born in 1929 in Stockholm, Sweden, the son of a Swedish diplomat, and grew up in Chicago. He studied literature and art history at Yale, then art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago — a writer's education for a man who would spend his career treating objects like words. He moved to New York in 1956 and landed in the downtown ferment: the happenings, the Judson Dance Theater crowd, the whole beautiful mess of artists inventing performance in lofts and church basements.
His first mature body of work was The Street (1959–60): figures and signs and objects drawn from the Bowery and the Lower East Side, made from cardboard cartons and used garbage bags — the actual trash of the neighborhood, reassembled into a population. The material was the message: the city discards, the artist collects. In the spring of 1961 some of these went into "Environments, Situations, Spaces" at the Martha Jackson Gallery. Then, in December 1961, he did the thing that made him famous.
1961: The Store
The Store opened in December 1961 in a rented storefront at 107 East Second Street — Oldenburg's own studio, converted into a shop. Inside were more than a hundred objects: pastries, dresses, shirts, sausages, cigarettes, ice cream, pies, lingerie, hamburgers — all of them made by hand from muslin soaked in plaster over wire frames, brightly painted with enamel, and priced and sold like actual merchandise. It was a performance, a sculpture installation, a retail business, and a joke, all at once. People could buy the art the way they bought a sandwich.
The audacity was not just the commerce. It was the craft. Oldenburg was mimicking mass production with the slowest possible method — dipping cloth in plaster, painting it by hand — and selling the results in the Lower East Side like a grocer. The Store collapsed the distance between the gallery and the street, between the unique art object and the thing you can buy. Funeral Heart belongs to this world: it is a Store object, one of the plaster goods, except that its merchandise is the most un-sellable thing there is — a heart, at a funeral.
1962–1969: soft and colossal
The plaster years lasted about eighteen months. In 1962 Oldenburg began making the same kinds of objects in giant scale and soft materials — canvas and vinyl stuffed with foam rubber, collapsing under their own weight: the seven-foot Floor Burger, the ten-foot Floor Cone, the giant BLT. The second version of The Store, at the Green Gallery on 57th Street in September 1962, introduced the giants. The humor stayed; the method inverted. Where the plaster works were hard shells around soft subjects, the soft works were soft shells around hard ones.
The rest of the decade was expansion in every sense. Bedroom Ensemble (1963), a room-sized motel tableau built in Los Angeles. The giant soft typewriters and toasters and telephones, in hard versions (wood, formica) and "ghost" versions (canvas) too. And in 1965 he began the project that would define the second half of his life: colossal public monuments. The first was Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (1969) at Yale — a giant lipstick on a tank tread base, promptly adopted by students as a protest monument. Oldenburg learned the lesson that would shape everything after: give the public the scale, and the public will supply the meaning.
He also had an alter ego, and it was not the mouse — not yet. It was the Ray Gun: an invincible weapon adapted from comic strips, which became his personal emblem, stamped and drawn across his work through the early sixties. The Ray Gun was Oldenburg's signature the way a cartoonist has a signature — the thing that said I was here, pointed at the world like a weapon and a joke at once.
1976–2022: the partnership
In 1976 Oldenburg began collaborating with Coosje van Bruggen — born 1942 in Groningen, the Netherlands, an art historian and critic who had written about Bruce Nauman and John Baldessari before she became his collaborator and, in 1977, his wife. The large-scale public projects are not just bigger Oldenburgs. They are a different thing: researched, engineered, negotiated with cities and fabricators, produced through drawings and models in a collaboration too close to divide back into two authors. More than forty large-scale projects in cities around the world, over thirty-three years: the clothespin in Philadelphia, the flashlight, the bat, the shuttlecocks in Kansas City, the bow and arrow on San Francisco's Embarcadero.
Van Bruggen died in 2009, of breast cancer. She was 67. Oldenburg kept working into his nineties, but the large-scale projects stopped — they were a partnership or they were nothing. He died on July 18, 2022, in New York. He was 93.
The heart, again
So back to Floor 2, back to the heart. Knowing the whole arc, Funeral Heart reads as the seed of everything: the plaster method, the merchandise logic, the size change, the joke that is not a joke. It is a heart rendered as a product — and then the title performs the Oldenburg twist, the one he would repeat for six decades. Take the object. Inflate it past comfort. Then tell the truth about it in the title. The apple core is refuse. The tie is a noose you choose. The heart is at a funeral.
What is being buried, exactly? The easy answer is romance, the valentine, the sentimental heart of popular culture — Oldenburg embalming the cliché in plaster and putting it on the wall like a hunting trophy. But there is a tenderness in the making that the reading misses. The muslin was dipped by hand. The enamel was painted by hand. The wire frame was bent by hand. For all its funereal title, the object is the product of extraordinary care — someone built this heart the way you build something you love, and then named it for grief. That contradiction is the whole man: the merchant who loved his merchandise, the satirist who could not stop caressing the thing he was mocking.
The Store closed long ago. The plaster hardened. The heart is still there, five feet tall, on Floor 2, pumping nothing, selling nothing, burying nothing — just hanging on the wall, insisting that the most familiar shape in the world can still surprise you if you make it big enough and name it honestly.
Go stand in front of it. It is the smallest big thing Oldenburg ever made, and the whole career is inside it. 🌁
Timeline — Claes Oldenburg
1929 — born in Stockholm, Sweden; grows up in Chicago, son of a Swedish diplomat
1940s–50s — studies literature and art history at Yale; art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
1956 — moves to New York; joins the downtown scene of happenings and Judson Dance Theater
1959–60 — The Street: Bowery figures made from cardboard and garbage bags
Spring 1961 — shows in "Environments, Situations, Spaces" at Martha Jackson Gallery
December 1961 — opens The Store at 107 East Second Street; sells 100+ plaster-enamel objects as merchandise; makes Funeral Heart
September 1962 — second version of The Store at Green Gallery; first giant soft sculptures appear
1962–63 — the soft giants: Floor Burger, Floor Cone, Giant BLT; Bedroom Ensemble in Los Angeles
1965 — begins proposing colossal public monuments
1969 — Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks at Yale; adopts the Ray Gun as personal emblem
1976 — begins collaborating with Coosje van Bruggen
1977 — marries van Bruggen; the large-scale public projects begin in earnest
1976–2009 — more than forty large-scale projects worldwide, including Cupid's Span (2002) on San Francisco's Embarcadero
2009 — Coosje van Bruggen dies of breast cancer, age 67; the large-scale projects end
2022 — dies July 18, New York, age 93
Today — Funeral Heart on view, Floor 2, 1900 to Now, SFMOMA, 151 Third Street