National Gallery of Art – Sculpture Garden

This guide to the National Gallery of Art's Sculpture Garden centers on Typewriter Eraser, Scale X, the roughly nineteen-foot pink-and-blue sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen that opened with the garden in 1999. It traces the everyday office object it enlarges, an eraser Oldenburg remembered from his father's desk, and the real structural engineering needed to keep a steel-and-fiberglass giant standing through wind, rain and ice. The National Gallery's own curator described it as chaos and order at once, coming apart in the same glance.