Union art school, and worked at getting his career under way. At first, Oldenburg painted "rather conservative nudes and portraits," (Lippard, 1966, p. 107). By 1959, however, Oldenburg had abandoned the human figure as his primary subject, and moved on to the use of ordinary objects--a course he has followed for nearly 40 years.
In his first show, held at the Judson Gallery in 1959, Oldenburg created various White Objects made with several kinds of paper. The use of "cheap and debased materials," such as newspaper, and the "deliberately primitive contours" of the roughly-made objects, reveal his acknowledged debt to the French painter Jean Dubuffet (Compton, 1970, p. 105). Like Dubuffet, Oldenburg was attracted to the idea of making art out of what he called "the impossible, the discredited, the different" (Oldenburg, quoted in Fineberg, 1995, p. 197). This influence was even more pronounced in Oldenburg's next show, The Street (1959). In tones of brown, black, and gray, Oldenburg created an installation that evoked the somber quality of New York streets, and was filled with papier-mGchT reproductions of urban trash.
This use of everyday objects clearly reflects the influence of the Pop group, as well as that of Dada. Like Pop artists, Oldenburg engaged in the "elevation of the common object to a fit and natural subject for artistic contemplation" (Geldzahler, 1985, p. 23). Like Dada artists, Oldenburg used humor in the presentation of objects whose standing as 'art' relied entirely on their placement in art spaces. But, while these artists' selection of objects referred to broader questions about society and art, Pop and Dada used commercial images, found objects, and Readymades in which the object was usually "left to speak for itself" (Lippard, 1966, p. 110). Oldenburg's attraction to such objects, however, was based on the potential he saw in them for transformation and expression. Though he used unaltered object...