Strange Eggs: Poems and Cutouts 1956–58
Description
Strange Eggs: Poems and Cutouts, 1956–58 is an artist’s book printed with great care on beautiful thick paper—a recomposition of the early work of a master craftsman famous for attention to every detail.
This is the first publication of the complete group of cutouts that Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) began making after moving to New York City’s Lower East Side in his 20s. They and the contemporaneous poems were “mostly done in an uncontrolled and intuitive dream mode,” as he later described. Made from found printed imagery, the Strange Eggs are enigmatic, surrealistic, and vastly different from the performances and Pop Art of the 1960s for which Oldenburg became famous. For this printed project he revisited the poems, selected pairings, and orchestrated the order of the poem–cutout pairs. Oversized and printed in high fidelity, Strange Eggs is a special treat.
About the Author
Claes Oldenburg is a world-famous artist and sculptor. He still uses the typewriter the poems were written on; his anthology Claes Oldenburg: Writing on the Side 1956–1969 was published in 2013.
