A Handkerchief for an Architectural Giant

As presented by Brookfield Properties and WatermanClark, in conjunction with Paula Cooper Gallery, Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen at Lever House is “the first significant presentation of the artists’ work since Oldenburg’s death in 2022.” In addition to Architect’s Handkerchief from 1999 and the more recent Plantoir, Red (Mid-Scale), done between 2001 and 2021, the year-long exhibition that opened last November includes sculptures, posters, and sketches in Lever House's lobby. One of the first glass-walled International Style office buildings in the United States, Lever House was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merril in 1952 for Unilever. It was recently restored by SOM for Brookfield and WatermanClark, who took possession of the building in 2020. Based on the current exhibition and the Ellsworth Kelly sculptures on display in the plaza and lobby at the time of our visit in 2023, it seems the new owners are striving to make the ground floor of the modern masterpiece a Midtown destination for art aficionados.

Claes Oldenburg was born in Sweden in 1929 but grew up in Chicago, moving to New York City in 1956. Initially engaged with “happenings” and performance art, Oldenburg opened a storefront studio in the East Village in 1961, doing it up like a neighborhood store and stocking it with plaster versions of a store's wares. By the end of that decade he had realized Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks at Yale University, paving the way for a career turning small mass-produced goods into colossal art objects, many of them done with Coosje van Bruggen, whom he married in 1977. Architect’s Handkerchief and Plantoir, Red (Mid-Scale) are clearly within this vein, but the former begs the question: Why that name? Why is it the architect's handkerchief?

Turns out the artists were inspired by none other than Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Architect’s Handkerchief is a 12-foot (3.6m) tall depiction of Mies's pocket handkerchief, specifically as captured by photographer Morley Baer and presented in the pages of Peter Blake's 1960 book The Master Builders: Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright. Although it is not included in the lobby display, Oldenburg made a collage in 1997 that shows his sketch for the sculpture next to a crop of Baer's photo. The collage, a screenprint and chine collé, is in the collection of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, while the sculpture itself is one of three that were made; one of them is permanently displayed in front of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, while this one was brought to Midtown Manhattan from Chicago, in front of Mies's 560–580 Lake Shore Drive (this writer could not determine the location of the third).

Both Architect’s Handkerchief and Plantoir, Red (Mid-Scale) are at home on Lever House's plaza. The gardening tool sits adjacent to the plaza's new trees, which were laid out by Reed Hilderbrand in the building's recent renovation, drawing attention to the project's provision of an urban landscape nearly a full decade ahead of New York City's 1961 zoning code revision, which gave developers incentives to do so across Manhattan. Alternatively, the handkerchief alludes to pinstripe suits and other mid-20th-century business attire, which found suitable architectural expression in Lever House's glass walls. Still, the inspiration for Architect’s Handkerchief makes it seem like the sculpture is slightly out of place, that it should be moved across Park Avenue to Mies's Seagram Building, which was built with its own sizable plaza six years after Lever House. Instead, and as a small hint of Mies's inadvertent role in the artwork, the curators of Claes Oldenburg & Coosje van Bruggen at Lever House angled the billowing handkerchief, as can be glimpsed in the bottom photo, toward the Seagram Building and the ghost of Mies.