The whopper that caused a scandal in Toronto

After the Green Gallery, the burger passed through the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, and from there, in early 1967, it crossed the border to Canada. The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto bought it, the deal finalized on 27 January 1967, for a token sum reported at US $2,000. (The figure is a handshake price more than a market valuation, and the dates carry a small wrinkle: the accession number is 66/29, reflecting the 1966 fiscal cycle, but the gallery gives 1967 as the acquisition year, and the credit line reads simply “Purchase, 1967.” The provenance, by the way, is the documented chain of who has owned a work, from the artist’s hand to now.)

The purchase caused an uproar. A public gallery had spent its money, and the public’s, on a giant soft hamburger, and a fair share of Torontonians were furious. Students mounted a mocking protest, building their own giant artwork in reply, a roughly nine-foot plywood ketchup bottle, to point out the absurdity of the thing the museum had bought. The “anyone could make this, and why did you pay for it” objection arrived with the burger and has trailed it ever since, which is more or less the reception every one of these breakthrough Pop objects got on its first day.

A soft sculpture ages in ways a bronze never does. Over decades the foam inside Floor Burger broke down and the great stuffed shape slowly lost its footing, so in 2012 the gallery’s conservator Sherry Phillipsled a careful restoration: the slumped internal foam and cartons were repositioned and given new support inside (cotton bags filled with a stable foam), and the painted surface was cleaned and re-adhered where it had flaked. It is the kind of repair that has more in common with fixing an old sofa than restoring a statue, which is exactly what you would expect of a monument built like a cushion. (One quieter note from the work’s long life: even the pickle on top has been replaced over the years.)

The burger that scandalized Toronto in 1967 is now one of the prized works in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s collection, on view as a landmark of Pop Art and of the soft sculpture Oldenburg helped invent. The thing he and Patty Mucha made out of canvas and foam in a New York apartment, the cheapest object in the world blown up huge and then made to sag, turned out to be one of the defining objects of Pop Art’s move into three dimensions, and of the soft-sculpture idea it helped launch. It is still there, still on the floor, still slowly settling, exactly as a monument is not supposed to do, with a pickle on top.