The Oldenburg Suite is the story of three Americans - immigrants all - who in their own unique ways made indelible contributions to modern art. In 1969, Claes Oldenburg, prominent sculptor and the intellectual father of Pop art, is feeling trapped and past his prime. His brother, Richard, is a publishing executive tempted by a once-in-a-lifetime offer from the Museum of Modern Art. And the Dutch art historian Coosje van Bruggen, destined to share a transformative connection with Claes, is desperate to become an artist in her own right. Over the following decade, Claes, Richard, and Coosje will explore and redefine what it means to be an artist - that slippery balance of control, connection, and reinvention that obsesses and consumes so many of us.

Quick Facts On The Oldenburg Suite

A Note From The Writers

The Oldenburg Suite was born in the summer of 2018 when we came across Richard Oldenburg’s obituary in an April edition of the New York Times. We were familiar with the story of Claes Oldenburg - a Swedish-born sculptor and one of the founding fathers of Pop art, whose work we had often enjoyed at MoMA and elsewhere - but had never known that Claes’s brother had been director of that very museum at the very time Claes was doing some of his most exciting work. Our instincts for stories about families and history perked up. Might Richard’s 1970s story be just as interesting as Claes’s?

As it turned out, yes. Just as Claes was reinventing himself as a pioneer of monumental public art - a pursuit that would eventually lead to outdoor sculpture like Cleveland’s Free Stamp and Minneapolis’s Spoonbridge and Cherry - his younger brother was taking the reins of a near-bankrupt American institution, riven by strikes, protests, and internal division, which in the course of less than a decade he had turned into one of the best-managed American nonprofits and a thriving cultural colossus. And all of this happened simultaneously to Claes’s meeting Coosje Van Bruggen, a Dutch curator and art historian who would shed her academic background to become his collaborator and as inspired an artist as he - she would also become his wife.

Oldenburg was originally written as a sung-through podcast musical for a project that never materialized. Hoping against hope, we submitted our working draft to the New York Musical Festival, and to our great edification, were chosen as a presentation in the summer of 2019 festival. Our production there won NYMF’s award for Best Concert Presentation. We rode this momentum to a January 2020 workshop at Montclair State University. We did a total of four shows at NYMF and MSU, and sold out all four.

Since our last workshop, The Oldenburg Suite has changed a great deal. We’ve spent the last year revising the script and score, including significantly expanding the book and rewriting almost half the score. We continue to find the best ways to emphasize our central themes of control, connection, and reinvention in the artistic temperament - a universal story, as each of us, in some way, has an artist’s heart. After three years of development, the show has been honored as a Richard Rodgers Award finalist and is ready to be fully staged. The time has never been better to bring The Oldenburg Suite to the stage, but in the meantime, we’ve been thrilled to bring the concert to audiences at Feinstein’s/54 Below in January & April of 2022, and as part of our solo concert series.

-James Feinberg & Matthew Dylan Rose

Who We’ve Worked With