Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen: Kansas City’s Shuttlecocks

Claes Olderburg and Coosje van Bruggen: Kansas City’s Shuttlecocks is a study of the commission and vicissitudes of a project by the world-renowned sculptors Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen for a major art museum and a public setting. The controversy that the commission initiated presented a challenge to explain a misunderstood work of art in an attempt to confirm the rightness of its acceptance. It is important for the reader to appreciate how artists resolve conflicts, how modern art functions, and to understand something of the cognitive issues undertaken by collaborative artists in the creative process.

About the Author

The author, a native of Detroit, retired as Emeritus Professor Art History at Case Western Reserve University 2010. He pursued graduate degrees at the University of Illinois (chemistry) and the University of Minnesota (art history). He is the award-winning author of more than a dozen books on such topics as Italian Renaissance art treatises, Master Drawings, Vatican tomb sculpture, late Baroque Roman architecture, and scores of wide-ranging scholarly articles and reviews on the sculpture of Praxiteles, Donatello and Pollaiuolo, Michelangelo’s drawings, Italian Mannerist architecture, caricature drawings, Goya’s portraits and Black Paintings, drawings by Degas, and Picasso’s Blue Period. He is completing a critical study and translation of Giulio Mancini’s Considerazioni sulla pittura of 1621, and a project involving infrared reflectance spectroscopy and X-radiation studies of easel paintings by Raphael.