Baked Potato, from the portfolio 7 Objects in a Box

Claes Oldenburg's Statement on Baked Potato (Claes Oldenburg: The Multiples Store, 1996, pp. 14-17):

'Baked Potato and Tea Bag, which developed almost concurrently, were the first multiples I made in a regulated commercial edition. This was the period of "soft" sculptures, which were sewn in canvas or vinyl using patterns derived from models built of cardboard and expanded polysterene.

Starting with the Paris food pieces of 1964, I developed a variation, making hard versions of the "soft" sculptures in the following way: Canvas works were filled with wet plaster. When the plaster had dried, the canvas was peeled off and discarded, leaving the contents, etched with reversed seams. This technique was used to create the masters of both Tea Bag and Baked Potato. In each case a unique sculpture was made at the same time as the master for the multiple, using an identical version of the sewn form. They differ because, though the form was the same, it could be shaped differently with the hands while the plaster was still wet. In both subjects there is a literal correspondence between the structure of the art work and that of the original: cloth = the paper in a tea bag or the skin of a potato; plaster = tea, wet by water or potato mass. The Baked Potato multiple shows the subject before consumption. The Tea Bag multiple represents the subject after use, having been discarded or dropped on a horizontal surface.

Baked Potato is a free-standing object, one of several in the box in which it was presented, 7 Objects in a Box. How to paint the work seemed to me a critical decision. It should be hand-painted like the unique work, but the hand-painting should be removed, objectified in some way in keeping with the work's mass-production character. I solved this by asking the painter John Wesley to do the work. He in turn suppressed his individuality by following a scheme I provided that culminated in a more-or-less random spray of green spots – "chives" – applied with a toothbrush. It was a balance of individuality, objectivity, and chance, such as that developed in the Happenings earlier in the 1960s. The multiple object was for me the sculptor's solution to making a print.'

Cast resin painted with acrylic, with the original Shenango china dish, 1966, signed in ink on the interior and lettered 'K', from the edition of 75 (with 25 lettered proofs and 2 artist's proofs), published by Tanglewood Press, New York, overall: 178 x 267 x 114 mm (7 x 10½ x 4 ½ in.)

Multiples Store 3; Multiples in Retrospect 3