Pop art veteran known for outsized, witty sculptures
Claes Oldenburg, who has died aged 93, was the Swedish-american sculptor who, while working within the broad traditions of pop art, developed his own style of giant sculpture. Using unexpected materials and an outsized scale so as to subvert the character and intensify the presence of the sculpture, Oldenburg celebrated and satirised American culture and consumerism. His subject matter was the overfamiliar – and hence unregarded – paraphernalia of everyday life, such as cheeseburgers and penknives, cutlery and shuttlecocks.
Although he was criticised for the unvarying nature of his development, this overlooks the wit and sophistication of his work and the originality of his ultimate move outside the confines of the gallery and into the urban arena, where his vast, colourful sculptures brightened many a neutral space and drab cityscape.
He was only half-joking when he proposed replacing Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square with an equally tall gear stick, mirroring what was inside the cars then encircling it.
Working in conjunction with his second wife, the writer Coosje van Bruggen, Oldenburg finally realised the ideal he had stated in his 1961 manifesto: ‘‘I am for an art that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum . . . an art that embroils itself in everyday crap . . . that is as heavy and coarse and blunt and stupid as life itself.’’
Yet by the end of the 20th century much of his work was indeed ‘‘sitting on its ass in a museum’’, curated, labelled and displayed as galleries held increasingly reverential retrospectives celebrating this high priest of pop art.
Claes Thure Oldenburg was born in Stockholm in 1929, the elder of two sons of Gosta Oldenburg, a Swedish diplomat, and his wife Sigrid, who had an interest in spiritualism. His brother, Richard, who died in 2018, was director of the Museum of
Modern Art, New York, from 1972 until 1994.
Young Claes spent his first three years in New York and another three in Oslo before his father was appointed consul in Chicago in 1937. Claes was educated at the Chicago Latin School. He studied drama and English literature at Yale and became interested in art after attending a watercolour summer school at the University of Wisconsin.
After a spell as a crime reporter for the Chicago News Bureau (‘‘I once covered the death of a man who’d spent his life collecting nuts and bolts – every drawer and receptacle in his apartment was full of nuts and bolts’’), he enrolled in the Chicago Institute of Art.
Having dropped out after two years in 1954, he undertook a variety of odd jobs, painting in his spare time. Although he exhibited locally, 1964 Venice Biennale, Oldenburg lived briefly in Paris before returning to New York. He worked on further ideas of the home, based on the Californian linear ideal, in addition to plaster-cast food, and soft sculptures of collapsing toilets and various parts of the Chrysler Airflow, a car that had fascinated him since childhood.
His first UK show was at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1963, where his big plaster ice cream cone was seen alongside works by Roy Lichtenstein and Warhol. A Times critic was unconvinced, writing: ‘‘both as realism and as anti-art, this American work smacks of the meretricious’’.
His first monument was Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (1969), commissioned by the graduates of Yale in protest against the Vietnam war. It consisted of a lifesize model of a tank with a tube of lipstick elevated from the gun turret. Made from steel, aluminium and wood and painted in enamel, the sculpture combines, in a typically Oldenburgian manner, humour, serious social comment and an underlying eroticism. The following year Stove, complete with nasty-looking food and cooking utensils, fetched £18,750 at a sale in New York.
In the ’70s, with his fame increasing and retrospectives of his work in America and Europe, Oldenburg increasingly divided his work between large-scale outdoor collaborative and technologically innovative commissions, and private pursuits of drawing and printmaking.
After he married van Bruggen in 1977, she brought a fresh impetus to his work. Together they devised and executed his large outdoor commissions, lectured, and in 1985 organised the collaborstion in Venice of Il Corso del Coltello (The Course of the Knife), which climaxed in a steel-and-wood sculpted boat in the shape of a Swiss army knife floating along the canal of the Arsenale.
For Oldenburg, the sight of a pedestrian allowing himself a wry grin as he passed a 21-metre red and yellow box of matches on the outskirts of Barcelona was its own reward.
Claes Oldenburg married, in 1960, Patty Mucha, an artist; the marriage was dissolved in 1970. Van Bruggen died in 2009. He is survived by a son and a daughter.
He was always on the lookout for something new. ‘‘What I fear most is to be drawn back into the past, into nostalgia,’’ he said. It was a bad sign if the public liked his work from the outset. ‘‘You have to jump into the unknown for them and jolt them into another way of looking at things.’’ – Telegraph Group, The Times