Bror Utter at the 1961 Dallas Claes Oldenburg Opening

We noticed this recently in Leigh Arnold’s DallasSites book. The Oldenburg show was one of the highlights of the no longer existent Dallas Museum of Contemporary Art.

Roger Winter describes an incident at the show’s opening:

Claes (Oldenburg) had a slice of like a meringue pie. I think something like a lemon pie, coconut pie made of plaster and enamel and probably burlap and chicken wire as the structure of it, and it was sitting on a little saucer on a chair that he’d borrowed from David and Norma McManaway, a blue chair—just an old-timey kitchen chair—and a painter from Fort Worth, . . . Bror Utter, came with a friend of his, Sam Cantey, who was, I think, president of one of the better banks in Fort Worth. And Bror, I think, got a little drunk and he was so outraged by all of this [Oldenburg’s installation] that he picked the piece of pie up off the chair and bit a piece out of it. . . . That seems always to me to be a remarkable reaction to art.

Above: From The Art of Food at Portland State University, September, 2022