Since November, “Architect’s Handkerchief” (1999), Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s 12-foot-tall abstract hankie sprouting from a breast pocket has waved from the street-level plaza of Lever House, at 390 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. The sculpture’s baroque white folds evoke the creamy marble of a Bernini, voluptuous even as its reinforced plastic would be useless to dab an eye. It offers different comfort, a visual rest stop from the rigid geometry unfolding around it.

Incredibly, for an artist who made New York his home for nearly 70 years, none of the fanciful public sculptures like these — the ones for which Oldenburg is most celebrated — are on permanent view in the city. This presentation at Lever House, a 1952 jewel of midcentury International Style, is a temporary correction, the first of Oldenburg’s work in New York since his death here in 2022. It includes the Gulliverian “Plantoir, Red (Mid-Scale)” (2001-2021), and a selection of smaller sculptures and schematic drawings.

The architect of “Architect’s Handkerchief” is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the last director of the Bauhaus and spiritual daddy of modernist architecture, whose Seagram Building is a clear shot across Park Avenue from Lever (designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill).

Oldenburg’s affection for Mies no doubt developed in Chicago, where both had first settled after emigrating from Europe. (This “Architect’s Handkerchief,” from an edition of three, was plucked from Lake Shore Drive in Chicago.) The Seagram Building is Mies’s only contribution to the New York skyline, making the work’s placement a canny distillation of Mies’s arm’s-length embrace of New York.

Oldenburg had no such ambivalence. He moved to New York City in 1956, and his art quickly absorbed the city’s ecstatic cacophony. He thrilled to the East Village’s dereliction and street trash, the messy detritus of daily life whose tactile splendors convinced him to abandon painting for sculpture.