Narrator: Claes Oldenburg made the work you see in this part of the gallery during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Former curator of Postwar Art Marla Prather: Marla Prather: Oldenburg at the time was living on the Lower East Side. And he showed the works of the store first in a gallery downtown, and then after that he moved into his own store, which was a kind of storefront on the Lower East Side, and it was also his gallery. And inside that store he made these objects. You could look in and see the artist there making them. And then he sold them right from the storefront. So he was really sort of circumventing the normal trade of art, and he was selling them directly to the man and woman on the street, as it were. And he was also taking his subject matter from the street. He was very taken with the kinds of sort of tawdry, cheap materials that he would see in shop windows around the Lower East Side, maybe a kind of tacky wedding dress, or in this case,some wonderful underwear that, with its garters and so forth, really dates this piece to the 1960s. He said that you have to make art out of the real world. And in fact, he referred to works like this as "rips out of reality." And he said that you have to look for beauty where it's not supposed to be found. And so he was looking to the mundane, the overlooked aspects of the real world.