His death was confirmed by Pace Gallery and Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, who represent him. The cause was complications from a fall, said Adriana Elgarresta, director of public relations at Pace. No pop artist—not even his contemporaries Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein—created a body of public works to rival his. “Art had to mean more than just producing objects for galleries and museums,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. “I wanted to locate art in the experience of life.” In 2017, reflecting on Mr. Oldenburg’s career, New York Times arts writer Randy Kennedy observed that it is easy “to forget how radical his work was when it first appeared, broadening the definition of sculpture by making it somewhat more accessible and human and more. stroke at the same time”. Mr. Oldenburg’s outdoor installations included a giant cherry balanced on a spoon in the sculpture garden at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. a monumental steel peg in Philadelphia’s central square. a 20-ton baseball bat in front of Chicago’s Social Security Administration building. and a 38-foot-tall lens at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In Washington, D.C., his work is represented by an enormous steel and fiberglass typewriter eraser in the sculpture garden of the National Gallery of Art. Although the subject of the sculpture is a mystery to many younger visitors, the giant pink wheel and wavy hairs give it a fascinating form. At least one of Oldenburg’s quirky proposals for the capital never came to fruition: a plan to replace the Washington Monument with a giant pair of scissors. In “Claes Oldenburg: Object into Monument,” the catalog for a 1973 exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, Mr. Oldenburg described the ideas behind the scissors. As the piece envisioned, the red handles would be buried in deep troughs, their exposed blades opening and closing within a day. “Like scissors, the US is bolted together,” he wrote, “two violent parts destined in their arc to meet as one.” Mr. Oldenburg probably never expected the scissors to be made. 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 mostly excellent excuses to make great designs. (In the case of the scissors, one of these designs is in the collection of the National Gallery.) Mr. Oldenburg’s second wife, the Dutch-born sculptor Coosje van Bruggen, was his partner from 1976 until her death in 2009. Although critics have sometimes questioned the extent of van Bruggen’s role, the couple maintained that their it was a real artistic collaboration for them. The ideas for the sculptures were conceived together, they said. Mr. Oldenburg then produced designs while handling construction and installation. Mr. Oldenburg’s work pleased collectors as well as critics. The 1974 “Clothespin Ten Foot” sold for more than $3.6 million at auction in 2015. In 2019, he sold his archive of 450 notebooks (along with thousands of drawings, photographs and other documents) to the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles . When Mr. Oldenburg arrived in New York in 1956, the era of abstract expressionist painting was drawing to a close. Young artists were pioneers in conceptual, performance and installation. After spending a few years painting, Mr. Oldenburg threw himself into the new movements. “I wanted work that said something, was messy, was a little mysterious,” he told the New York Times. His first solo show, in 1959 at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, consisted largely of abstract sculptures made of paper, wood, and string—things he said he had found on the street. His early work, “based on the castoff and the crude, the flotsam and jetsam of modern life — was a hit from the start with his contemporaries,” Kennedy reported in the Times. In 1960, while working as a dishwasher in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Mr. Oldenburg found himself fascinated by the shapes of food and tableware. In early 1961, he unveiled an installation called “The Store” featuring plaster models of actual grocery items. At that point, his colors became “very, very strong,” Mr. Oldenburg said in a recorded speech in 2012. And his pieces became curvy. “My mood is really in touch,” he said. “I see things in the round and I want to do them in the round. I want to be able to pet them and touch them.” For a second edition of “The Store,” in late 1961, Mr. Oldenburg rented an actual storefront on East Second Street in Manhattan. There he showed off a 10-foot ice cream cone, a 5-by-7-foot hamburger and a 9-foot slice of cake. The pieces were made of fabric and their head seamstress was Patricia Muschinski, known as Patty Mucha, an artist who was married to Mr. Oldenburg from 1960 to 1970. These were among the first of hundreds of soft sculptures she created. these years. According to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which has a poster for “The Store,” the work was “a Pop Art landmark” that “heralded Oldenburg’s interest in the slippery line between art and merchandise and the role of the artist to himself. -projection.” By the mid-1960s, Mr. Oldenburg was an art-world star. In 1969, it was the subject of the first major pop art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The show included more than 100 of his sculptures (including a recreation of “The Store”) and dozens of drawings. But he was already thinking beyond the boundaries of museums and galleries. In 1969, he created ‘Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks’, a giant puffy-tip lipstick mounted on a plywood base that resembled military tank treads. Commissioned by a group of Yale architecture students, it was prominently parked on the university’s 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 location. After “Lipstick,” Mr. Oldenburg created one “Colosseum” after another. They included a large Robinson Crusoe umbrella in Des Moines. a Brobdingnagian electric plug in Oberlin, Ohio. and a huge seal in Cleveland. How the piece was connected to the site was sometimes clear only to Mr. Oldenburg and van Bruggen. Oldenburg and van Bruggen occasionally collaborated with architect Frank Gehry, who incorporated their giant binoculars into the West Coast headquarters he designed for the Los Angeles advertising agency Chiat/Day, which opened in 1991. (Upright, the binoculars form a kind of archway through which cars enter the building’s garage.) Claes Thure Oldenburg was born in Stockholm on January 28, 1929. His mother was a concert singer and his father was a Swedish consular officer whose job required the family to relocate frequently. The Oldenburgs moved to Chicago in 1936. Claes’ strongest memories of that time, he said, were of his mother filling notebooks with photographs 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 designing levers for pesticide advertisements, before moving to New York. For decades, he split his time between Lower Manhattan and Beaumont-sur-Deme, France. President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Arts in 2000. Survivors include two stepchildren, Maartje Oldenburg and Paulus Kapteyn. and three grandchildren. His younger brother, Richard, who died in 2018, spent 22 years as director of the Museum of Modern Art and later was president of Sotheby’s America. Despite Mr. Oldenburg’s success, only a small fraction of his proposed monuments were built. Unrealized ideas include planting a giant mirror — symbolizing a backward culture — in London’s Trafalgar Square (1976) and replacing the Statue of Liberty with a giant electric fan to blow migrants into the sea (1977). He also suggested a sewer pipe 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 a pair of scissors for Washington. At times he did not expect to be taken seriously. In a taped interview accompanying 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.”
