Sculpture in the Form of a Bicycle Saddle

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 the medium, and a hallow version struck me as an interesting complement to the solid one. As it turned out, the large marble version was never executed, due in part to the difficulty of obtaining permission for any new outdoor sculpture in London. The small version went ahead on its own as a kind of miniature of a larger work that might have been.'

Partially glazed cast ceramic, mahogany, sand, 1976, signed in gold ink and numbered from the edition of 36 (there are also 9 artist's proofs), published by Petersburg Press, London and New York, overall: 356 x 216 x 216 mm (14 x 8½ x 8½ in.)

Multiples Store 17; Multiples in Retrospect 17