“I’m interested in objects that revolve around food and clothing. And I think that has to do with my interest in myself and in other human beings.”

—Claes Oldenburg

Oldenburg in Paris, 1964

In 24 Open-Faced Sandwiches, 1964, Claes Oldenburg serves up an assortment of thickly spread, colorful bread slices—artfully arranged in tilted stacks and executed in plaster—within a glass case, evoking the display of a traditional French bakery. Created in anticipation of his inaugural solo exhibition at Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris, 24 Open-Faced Sandwiches exemplifies Oldenburg’s ability to transform everyday objects into high art, blending American Pop Art with French cultural traditions. This exhibition, one of the first at Sonnabend’s eponymous Paris gallery, which opened in the fall of 1964, played a key role in introducing Oldenburg’s work to European audiences and reinforcing his significance within the emerging Pop Art movement. Opening in October 1964, the Sonnabend show came on the heels of Oldenburg’s participation in that year’s Venice Biennale, where he and his peers established Pop Art as a global force, marking a turning point for both the artist and the American art world. 24 Open-Faced Sandwiches has since featured in major exhibitions, including Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, etc… at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles in 1965. More recently, the work was prominently displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in two significant and nearly consecutive exhibitions: a 2013 retrospective of Oldenburg’s oeuvre and Ileana Sonnabend: Ambassador for the New, which ran from 2013 to 2014. As both a playful homage and critique of consumption and identity, 24 Open-Faced Sandwiches remains a pivotal work in Oldenburg’s career, distinguished by its impeccable provenance and rich exhibition history.

The exhibition at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend signaled not only the beginning of what would become a decades-long partnership between Oldenburg, Sonnabend, and her ex-husband, Leo Castelli, but also represented a moment of reevaluation for the artist. It was during this time that he returned to and refined the themes of The Store, his iconic 1961 installation of a mock shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Oldenburg’s New York storefront circumvented the traditional gallery model by moving his studio and showroom to street level, allowing him to sell his artwork directly to the public. His creations—cakes, hamburgers, shoes, hosiery, ice-cream cones—were distinctly American, and his approach was a direct challenge to the elitist gallery system and a celebration of everyday consumerism and mundane objects. For his Paris reprisal, Oldenburg infused his food sculptures with a distinctly French character, a deliberate departure from the American-centric pieces of The Store. "I arrived in Paris, and we went to a lot of restaurants, and I studied the food. And I started to make what basically was a pastry shop," Oldenburg recalled.ⁱ This shift is vividly captured in 24 Open-Faced Sandwiches, alternately titled Tartines, which represents the quintessentially French bistro fare. Bread, a staple of the French diet, and the tartine, known as the national breakfast of France, are cultural symbols. Here, Oldenburg’s plaster toppings for his take on the iconic one-slice-fits-all sandwich—tinted shades of brown, red, orange, yellow, gray, and white—mimic classic breakfast spreads: Nutella, strawberry jam, marmalade, and more. When Oldenburg created this sculpture in 1964, France's love of Nutella was just beginning. The Italian company Ferrero had entered France in 1959, acquired a confectionery company, and by 1961, rolled out Nutella for the French market, initially naming it La Tartinoise to highlight its nature as a "pâte à tartiner"—a spreadable paste made from hazelnuts.ⁱⁱ

“Claes had a show at Ileana’s…a great show there. It was pastry things…very delicately painted. Very Parisian. No shiny enamel, just very soft.”

—Patty Mucha

“Food is like clay; you can sculpt with it. Also it has an odor, and you can eat it. I don’t eat a lot of cake, but I do make cakes! And unlike the Campbell’s Soup Cans, my food is a humanized form and scale.”

—Claes Oldenburg

If The Store addressed still life in sculpture, Oldenburg's Paris confections explored still life within the European painting tradition. Juxtaposing buttery soft spreads with gleaming porcelain platters and a sleek glass-and-metal display case, 24 Open-Faced Sandwiches evokes a classic still life. However, unlike masters of the genre such as Cézanne or Vollon, Oldenburg sought to strip his objects of their descriptive, self-evident logic, divorcing them from conventional emotional content so they could instead exist independently as created objects. During his time in Paris, Oldenburg engaged with the familiar language of still life, translating the subject from painting to sculpture and distancing himself from traditional attitudes about representation. In a 1965 interview coinciding with the first anniversary of his Sonnabend show, Oldenburg asserted: 

“What I want to do is to create an independent object which has its own existence in a world outside of both the real world as we know it and the world of art. It’s an independent thing which has its own power, just to sit there and remain something of a mystery.”^ix

Presenting his 24 Open-Faced Sandwiches on actual dishware, Oldenburg heightens the tension between the appetizing appearance of the fare and its obvious artificiality—an interplay he described as a way of “frustrating expectations,” noting that “the food, of course, can’t really be eaten, so that it’s an imaginary activity which emphasizes the fact that it is, after all, not real that it’s art, whatever that strange thing is of doing something only for itself rather than for function.”^x Otto Hahn, a French art critic, captured this essence in the catalogue accompanying the Sonnabend show, stating, “All of Oldenburg's art flows into the space that separates a man from the world, a space full of inhibition and hostility, a space rigid with habit."^xi By interrupting our normal mode of looking, Oldenburg provides newfound delight in the everyday, celebrating the aesthetics of daily life with palpable enthusiasm.

“Most of [Oldenburg’s] 1950s and ’60s sculpture is relic fragile now; maybe it always was. But it still does at least a couple of things Pop Art was meant to do. Like advertising it makes the everyday world look larger — grander, grosser — than life. And it confirms that art, with all of its deceptions, contradictions and empty ethical calories, is a form of nourishment we can’t seem to get our fill of.”

—Holland Cotter

ⁱ Claes Oldenburg, quoted in Bruce Hooton, Oral history interview with Claes Oldenburg, 1965 Feb. 19, Interview Transcript, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, online.

ⁱⁱ “Nutella: A Story of Love and Passion,” Inside Nutella, online.

ⁱⁱⁱ Claes Oldenburg, quoted in Bruce Hooton, Oral history interview with Claes Oldenburg, 1965 Feb. 19, Interview Transcript, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, online.

^iv Ibid.

^v Ibid.

^vi Ibid.

^vii Jan van der Marek, "Assemblage, Pop, and Nouveau Realisme, 1957- 1967," Contemporary Art, 1942-72: Collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York, 1973, p. 266.

^viii Claes Oldenburg, quoted in Gallery label from Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store, April 14–August 5, 2013, Museum of Modern Art, New York, online.

^ix Claes Oldenburg, quoted in Jan McDevitt, ‘The Object: Still Life’, Craft Horizons 25, September 1965, p.31.

^x Claes Oldenburg, quoted in Gallery label from Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store, April 14–August 5, 2013, Museum of Modern Art, New York, online. 

^xi Otto Hahn, "La Demarche de Claes Oldenburg," Claes Oldenburg, Paris, 1964, p. 6.