Claes Oldenburg, an artist of Swedish descent, whose cheerful caricatures of everyday things, such as monumental representations of lipsticks and binoculars, as well as “soft sculptures” of burgers and ice cream cones, made him a leading force in pop art, died July 18 at his home in Manhattan. He was 93 years old.
His death was confirmed by Pace Gallery and Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, who represent him. The cause was the complications of a fall, said Adriana Elgarresta, Pace’s director of public relations.
No pop artist, not even his contemporaries Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, created a public work that rivaled his own. “Art had to mean more than producing objects for galleries and museums,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. “I wanted to place art in the experience of life.”
In 2017, reflecting on the career of Mr. Oldenburg Times New York Times art writer Randy Kennedy noted that it’s easy to “forget the radicalism of his work when it first appeared, broadening the definition of sculpture to make it somehow more accessible and human. cerebral at the same time. “
The outdoor facilities of Mr. Oldenburg included a giant cherry balanced on a spoon in the sculpture garden at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; a monumental steel clothespin in downtown Philadelphia Square; a 20-ton baseball bat in front of the Chicago Social Security Administration building; and a 38-foot-tall lantern at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.
In Washington, his work is depicted by a giant steel and fiberglass typewriter eraser in the National Gallery of Art’s sculpture garden. While the theme of the sculpture is a mystery to many younger visitors, its giant pink wheel and wavy bristles give it an attractive shape.
At least one peculiar Oldenburg proposal for the capital was never realized: a plan to replace the Washington Monument with giant scissors.
In “Claes Oldenburg: Object into Monument,” the catalog of a 1973 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. Oldenburg described the ideas behind the scissors. As the piece imagined, the red handles would be buried in deep troughs, their exposed leaves opening and closing in the course of a day.
“Like scissors, the U.S. is stuck,” he wrote, “two violent parts destined for its bow to meet as one.”
Mr. Oldenburg probably never expected scissors to be built. David Pagel, a professor of art theory and history, wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2004 that “most of the time” Mr. Oldenburg’s “absurd proposals” were primarily great excuses for making great drawings. (In the case of scissors, one of these drawings is in the collection of the National Gallery).
Mr. Oldenburg’s second wife, the Dutch sculptor Coosje van Bruggen, was his collaborator from 1976 until his death in 2009. Although critics sometimes questioned the scope of van Bruggen’s role. , the couple argued that theirs was a true artistic association. The ideas for sculptures were conceived together, they said. Then, Mr. Oldenburg produced drawings while she was in charge of the manufacture and location.
The work of Mr. Oldenburg appealed to both collectors and critics. His 1974 “Clothespin Ten Foot” sold for more than $ 3.6 million at auction in 2015. In 2019, he sold his 450-notebook archive (along with thousands of drawings, photographs and other documents). at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
When Mr. Oldenburg arrived in New York in 1956, the era of abstract expressionist painting was coming to an end. Young artists were pioneers in conceptual, performance, and installation art. After spending a couple of years painting, Mr. Oldenburg set out on new moves. “I wanted a job that said something, was messy, was a little mysterious,” he told the New York Times.
His first solo exhibition, in 1959 at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, consisted mainly of abstract sculptures made of paper, wood and rope, things he said he had found on the street. His early works, “based on abandonment and crude, on the flow and jetsam of modern life, were a success from the beginning with his contemporaries,” Kennedy told the Times.
In 1960, while working as a dishwasher in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Mr. Oldenburg was fascinated by the shapes of food and crockery. In early 1961, he introduced an installation called “The Store” that included plaster models of real grocery store items.
At that point, his colors became “very, very strong,” Mr. Oldenburg in a talk recorded in 2012. And his pieces turned into curves. “My disposition really is the touch,” he said. “I see things in the round, and I want to do them in the round. I want to be able to caress and touch them. “
For a second version of “The Store,” in late 1961, Mr. Oldenburg rented a real shop window on East Second Street in Manhattan. There he showed off a 10-foot-long ice cream cone, a 5-by-7-foot burger, and a nine-foot slice of cake. The pieces were made of cloth, and their main seamstress was Patricia Muschinski, known as Patty Mucha, an artist who married Mr. Oldenburg between 1960 and 1970. These were one of the first of a hundred sculptures. soft that produced over the years.
According to the New York Museum of Modern Art, which owns a poster for “The Store,” the piece was “a landmark of pop art” that “announced Oldenburg’s interest in the slippery line between the ‘art and merchandise and the role of the artist in himself’. -promotion. “
In the mid-1960s, Mr. Oldenburg was a world star of art. In 1969, it was the subject of the first major pop art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibit included more than 100 of his sculptures (including a recreation of “The Store”) and dozens of drawings.
But I was already thinking beyond the confines of museums and galleries.
In 1969, he created “Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks,” a giant lipstick with an inflatable tip mounted on a plywood base that resembled the treads of military tanks. Commissioned by a group of Yale architecture students, it was prominently parked on the university campus.
The sculpture was both a physical manifestation of the anti-war slogan “make love, not war” and a platform from which speeches could be made. But in 1974 (after Mr. Oldenburg rebuilt the piece in metal), the university moved it to a less prominent place.
After “Lipstick,” Mr. Oldenburg created one “Colossal Monument” after another. They include a large Robinson Crusoe umbrella at Des Moines; a Brobdingnagian electrical plug in Oberlin, Ohio; and a huge rubber stamp in Cleveland. Sometimes only Mr. Oldenburg and van Bruggen were clear on how the piece was connected to the site.
Oldenburg and van Bruggen occasionally collaborated with architect Frank Gehry, who incorporated his binocular giants into the West Coast headquarters he designed for the Chiat / Day advertising agency in Los Angeles, which was open in 1991. (Standing, binoculars form a kind of arch. through which cars enter the garage of the building.)
Claes Thure Oldenburg was born in Stockholm on January 28, 1929. Her mother had been a concert singer, and her father was a Swedish consular officer whose job required the family to move frequently.
The Oldenburgs moved to Chicago in 1936. Claes’ strongest memories of that period, she said, were of her mother filling notebooks with photos from American magazines, including advertising images similar to those that later appeared. in his work.
Mr. Oldenburg studied literature and art at Yale. After graduating in 1950, he worked as a reporter in Chicago while taking art classes at night. He also spent time in San Francisco, where he made a living drawing ponds for pesticide ads, before moving to New York. For decades, he divided his time between Lower Manhattan and Beaumont-sur-Deme, France.
President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of the Arts in 2000.
Among the survivors are two stepchildren, Maartje Oldenburg and Paulus Kapteyn; and four grandchildren. His younger brother, Richard, who died in 2018, spent 22 years as director of the Museum of Modern Art and later became president of Sotheby’s America.
Despite all the success of Mr. Oldenburg, only a small fraction of its proposed monuments were built.
Unrealized ideas include planting a giant rear-view mirror, a symbol of a backward culture, in London’s Trafalgar Square (1976) and replacing the Statue of Liberty with a giant electric fan to blow up immigrants at sea (1977).
He also proposed a drain for Toronto, a windshield wiper for Grant Park in Chicago, an ironing board for Manhattan’s Lower East Side and a banana for Times Square, as well as scissors for Washington.
Sometimes, he didn’t expect to be taken seriously. In a recorded interview that accompanied a 2012 exhibition in Vienna, Mr. Oldenburg said, “The only thing that really saves the human experience is humor. I think without humor it wouldn’t be much fun.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Claes Oldenburg survivors include three grandchildren, based on inaccurate information from the Paula Cooper Gallery. He is survived by four grandchildren. The article has been corrected.