Photo By Gail

I’ve seen some pretty unusual works of art in my life, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this: an entire wedding cake made out of pieces of a Claes Oldenburg sculpture.

I spotted this wonderful object while on a tour of  the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation in Beverly Hills, and admit it does look like an elaborate, slightly lumpy white wedding cake. Look closer though, and you can see the obvious seams. This isn’t one sculpture carved to look like a cake — it is a cake assembled from individual slices of one of Oldenburg’s most delightfully unconventional works, Wedding Souvenir, created in 1966.

And yes, there is an actual wedding story behind it.

Oldenburg created Wedding Souvenir for the April 23, 1966 wedding of James Elliott and Judith Algar, which took place in Topanga Canyon. Elliott was then a curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, so this was hardly an ordinary wedding reception. In addition to serving a traditional wedding cake  to their guests, the couple commissioned Oldenburg to create something that could serve as a permanent souvenir to take home.

Oldenburg made a plaster model of a single slice of wedding cake in New York and sent it to Beryl’s Studio in Los Angeles, where molds were made for producing multiple copies. By the morning of the wedding, there were probably around 250 plaster slices, although Oldenburg later noted that no exact production record survived and the pieces weren’t numbered. Many were stamped underneath “Claes Oldenburg Wedding Souvenir Los Angeles 1966,” while some were signed by Oldenburg during the party.

Here’s where things get particularly good.

The white plaster slices were placed on paper plates for the wedding guests to take home, but there was also a special group of 72 silver-tinted slices. Eighteen of those were assembled into a complete cake and given to the newlyweds, while individual silver slices went to members of the wedding party.

One couple apparently took 18 white slices plus a spare home from the wedding and assembled them into their own complete cake. The remaining slices eventually went to LACMA and traveled with the Elliotts when James Elliott became director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. The Elliotts subsequently assembled two more complete cakes from the remaining slices and sold them.

Individual Cake Slice Photographed at LACMA in Los Angeles

The cake I photographed at the Weisman Foundation has a particularly wonderful history to contemplate. Rather than being a sculpture that merely looks like a wedding cake, it is made from the very kind of individual Wedding Souvenir slices that Oldenburg originally created to be dispersed among wedding guests. Its existence as a complete cake is almost a second chapter in the artwork’s story.

In fact, Oldenburg himself was somewhat insistent about this distinction. He considered Wedding Souvenir to be a multiple in the form of a single slice, rather than a sculpture of a complete cake. The fact that some of the slices were subsequently reunited into cakes was something that happened later.

That makes the work a perfect example of Oldenburg’s playful approach to everyday objects. A wedding cake is normally temporary: you eat it, photograph it, maybe freeze the top tier, and then it’s gone. Oldenburg turned that fleeting ritual into something you could literally put on a shelf. Better yet, he made enough of them for the guests to go home with their own little piece of Pop Art history.

What I love about this work is that it’s not  just a sculpture of  a sliced wedding cake, but a wedding favor, a souvenir, a multiple, a little bit of performance art and a very clever Pop Art joke — sliced into approximately 250 pieces, each with its own story.