Label
Label from 2014.It's All American:
Claes Oldenburg was one of the earliest American artists to use everyday objects, like baseball bats, as subjects for art. In this work, he celebrates baseball as the “great American pastime.”
Oldenburg first came to prominence as a Pop artist in the early 1960s; this lithograph is, in fact, based on a 1967 drawing for a colossal bat sculpture, which he proposed for a street corner in Chicago. It was never built, but the bat concept came to fruition in his 101 feet tall, 1977 Batcolumn in Chicago. Shuttlecocks (1994), another of Oldenburg’s large-scale sculptures, stands on the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City. These works seem funny because of their unexpected sizes.
Oldenberg’s bat can also be seen as sly reference to a phallic symbol. In the mid-1950s the artist read Sigmund Freud’s book “Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious,” which discussed, among other concepts, the humor of the sexual double entendre. Several of his other works have similar shapes, such as his Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, 1969, or his 1968 lithograph Scissors as Monument.Label
(from 2016.Klassics for Kids)
Claes Oldenburg
American, b. 1929
Bat Spinning at the Speed of Light, 1975
lithograph
This print is related to Oldenburg's Batcolumn, 1975, a 101-foot tall sculpture in Chicago. According to a nearby plaque, "Oldenburg selected the baseball bat as an emblem of Chicago's ambition and vigor. The sculpture's verticality echoes the city's dramatic skyline, while its form and scale cleverly allude to more traditional civic monuments, such as obelisks and memorial columns."