All sorts of valuable objects: drainpipes, knives, electric sockets, Chryslers, bananas, safety pins and other familiar items populated three concurrent New York shows of drawings and sculptures by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen

Enter Papa Nosedrop waving a huge ugly object. From the sky all sorts of valuable objects begin falling and sailing. Shirts, shoes, coats, girdles, bras, electric thises and thatses. The contents of the whole Sunday Edition. --Claes Oldenburg, Store Days, 1967

The immediate appeal of the Whitney Museum's collection of Claes Oldenburg's drawings--as presented in the first of two parts of a recent exhibition--proceeds from the famously casual authority of the artist's draftsmanship, developed in the pursuit of a sculptural ideal. Studies for public sculptures proposed in the 1990s, during the nearly 30 years of Oldenburg's collaboration with Coosje van Bruggen, made up the second part of the exhibition. These drawings give the architecturally colossal expressive intimacy and are vivified by the possibility of the forms expanding into living space as monuments. (1 The works in this discursive exhibition served as both index and broad historical context for simultaneous exhibitions of sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden and at PaceWildenstein, Chelsea.

Pressed for space, the Whitney exhibition's curator, Janie C. Lee, divided the installation between two smallish galleries, with work from 1959 to 1977 on the fifth floor and larger-scale drawings from 1992 to 1998 in the lobby gallery below. If the works shown reflected the artist's state of mind, then the young Oldenburg's interests were all over the block. A domestic interior in crayon showing his first wife and collaborator, Pat Oldenburg, is paired with a sketch of an abandoned bicycle (both 1959); these works speak quietly with an anxious, provisional quality appropriate to the immediacy of the moment. His funky street scenes, drawings of the Store (the 1961-62 show in which he stocked a studio storefront with "products" of his own devising, mostly food and clothing) and rude designs for exhibition posters that follow seemed to offer small evidence of Oldenburg's ability to render a convincing likeness. Yet these forays into bad drawing initiated an assault on the conventions of the art world and communicated his disregard for business as usual.

When, later, Oldenburg published Store-related drawings, inventories, theater programs and Robert McElroy's photographs in Store Days, he noted that as an artist he intended to speak through his drawing and sculpture. By coloring the surfaces of his Store objects, he aspired to return painting to sculpture, as in polychromed antiquity. Seemingly celebrating that hoped-for victory, the loopy, bravely grinning Nude Figure with American Flag--ABC HOORAY (1960), included in the Whitney exhibition, exploded from pages of Store Days busy with typescripts and programs, sketches of sets and objects, and entries salted with puns. It is a drawing made for the pleasure of the act and for the evident enjoyment of the subject.

The gymnastic coupling of Sex Act (1961) seems pure painting in its expressive rush of crayon and watercolor. The greater detail of the drawings Drainpipe--Dream State and Nude with Electric Plug (both 1967) captures the astonishment of Oldenburg's Daphne nymphet as she metamorphoses into drainpipe and electric socket. There are reiterations of families of forms, often big at the bottom and round at the top, or the inverse. The Dream State sketch follows an otherworldly proposal for an underground monument, also in the form of a drainpipe; the form reappears as the downspout of a proposed monument for Toronto (1966) intended to drain into Lake Ontario. In a closer view (1967), a drainpipe debouches a colossal waterfall. By 1972, Oldenburg transformed these waterworks into the regal celadon Proposal for a Cathedral in the Form of a Colossal Faucet, Lake Union, Seattle. His interest in transformation continues: the central figure of Proposed Colossal Monument for Central Park North, N.Y.C.--Teddy Bear (1967) formally suggests a relationship to Study of a Soft Fireplug, Inverted (1969) and, more reductively, to the louche Two Fagends Together, I and II (both 1968). Right side up, the much-favored subject of the double-headed fireplug suggests the truncated torso of a woman, which, by a small stretch of the imagination, returns the viewer full circle to the dream-works drainpipe.

Early on, Oldenburg considered elevations and alternate views of common objects and appliances as potential sculpture in such forms as wall switches, an upright vacuum cleaner with a movable handle like a sail (both 1964), a Silex juicer (1965) and, later, a collapsible ice bag (1969). The rigor of their rendering proposes a professional utility as studies for the development of monumental objects. A sketch of the Chrysler Airflow (its contours as rounded as a soft sculpture) followed by multiple views of the Airflow on the panels of a die-cut box and the flaccid Study for a Soft Sculpture in the Form of an Airflow Instrument Panel, Wheel, Gearshift, etc. (all 1965) offer variations on what became a favored theme. In a work called Looking Up Two Girls at Expo '67, Looking at a Giant Baseball Bat, in Fuller Sphere (1967), the complex, provocatively leggy figures populate a Reginald Marsh-like rendering of the potential audience for a complete and sited work.