Claes Oldenburg
Soft Alphabet
New York City, USA: Multiples, Inc., 1978
74 x 56.2 x 7.3 cm.
Edition of 16 [+ 2 AP] signed and numbered copies
Wim Crouwel (1928 - 2019) was a designer and typographer who began working for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, in 1964.
In 1970, Crouwel designed the catalogue Claes Oldenburg for the museum, with a stark cover featuring only the artist’s name and the initials of the institution (see previous post). The embossed text was in a typeface inspired by Oldenburg’s iconic soft sculptures that came to be known as ‘padded letters’. They are built on an elementary three-by-three unit grid, altered slightly for the ascenders, descenders, and the letter “M,” employing an inner rounded corner.1
“When the catalogue was finished and Claes saw it,” Crouwel later said, "he asked me if I would do the whole alphabet. So I did. Then he sent me a lovely drawing, of his ice-cream alphabet, with the dripping letters.”
Oldenburg transformed the characters into soft objects themselves, and produced them for Marian Goodman’s Multiples Inc., in 1978. The forty-one characters are sand-filled bags made of sewn cotton, housed in a large screen-printed wooden box which is signed on the underside in black ink.
The work has a value of about twenty-thousand dollars. The study for the work (graphite and wax crayon on paper, below) is valued at upwards of a hundred thousand dollars.
1. Crouwel also invented the typeface New Alphabet, which was not used for anything of note for twenty-one years, when it appeared on the cover of Joy Division’s Substance LP.
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