Wedding Souvenir

£4,500 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books

Claes Oldenburg's Statement on Wedding Souvenir Souvenir (Claes Oldenburg: The Multiples Store, 1996, pp. 18-19): 'Wedding Souvenir was conceived as a multiple in the form of a single slice of wedding cake made for the wedding of James Elliott and Judith Algar on April 23, 1966. Elliott was then curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and lived in an apartment over the merry-go-round on the Santa Monica Pier. The proximity of Beryl's Studio, the souvenir casting shop where two years earlier I had bought the decorative reliefs used in the California Ray Guns, must have had some influence on the conception of the Wedding Souvenir. I made the original in New York and sent it to Beryl's, where several molds were made for mass production of the slides. By the morning of the wedding there were probably about 250 slices; no record survives, nor can anyone remember how many were actually made, and the slices were not numbered. Many, but apparently not all, were stamped "Claes Oldenburg Wedding Souvenir Los Angeles 1966." The photographer John Bryson, a friend of Jim's who was covering the event for Life magazine, documented the stamping and packing of the slices and, later, their display on paper plates before the wedding reception. According to Elliott, seventy-two of the slices were tinted silver on their tops with spray enamel. Eighteen of these formed a cake, which was given to the Elliotts. Single silver-tinted slices were also given to the forty-five

• Binding: Hardcover

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