Sculpture in the Form of a Bicycle Saddle

£7,500 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books · No longer available

Claes Oldenburg's Statement on Sculpture in the Form of a Bicycle Saddle (Claes Oldenburg: The Multiples Store, 1996, p. 42): 'A bicycle seat, like a three-way electronic plug, is an industrial object with the potential of becoming a sculpture. Another example is the World War I cannon meticulously carved in stone and placed by itself on a pedestal near Hyde Park Corner in London. I head this monument was a favorite of Dubuffet. The bicycle seat was to have been an outdoor object-sculpture in London, commissioned by Paul Cornwall-Jones for placement in front of his office on Petersburg Place near the northwest end of Kensington Gardens. As I imagined it, the seat – which in England became the saddle – would be carved of marble in a nineteenth-century cemetery style, with the surface of the saddle emerging like the polished representation of flesh out of rough stone. The role of a bicycle seat as sculpture goas back, of course, to Picasso's Head of a Bull (1943). I had drawn a variation of this work on a napkin in a London restaurant, substituting a sliced strawberry for the seat. The merging of these shapes – seat and upended strawberry slice – turned Bicycle Saddle into a sculpture in the round, able to stand independently without a base. Meanwhile, I had been shown experiments in ceramic sculpture conducted at the Royal College of Art under the direction of David Queensberry. Since Bicycle Saddle now had a form somewhat like a bottle, it seemed like a suitable subject for t

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.