Artist Claes Oldenburg, maker of huge urban sculptures, dies at 93

NEW YORK — Pop artist Claes Oldenburg, who turned the mundane into the monumental through his outsized sculptures of a baseball bat, a clothespin and other objects, has died at age 93.

Oldenburg died Monday morning in Manhattan, according to his daughter, Maartje Oldenburg. He had been in poor health since falling and breaking his hip a month ago.

The Swedish-born Oldenburg drew on the sculptor’s eternal interest in form, the dadaist’s breakthrough notion of bringing readymade objects into the realm of art, and the pop artist’s ironic, outlaw fascination with lowbrow culture — by reimagining ordinary items in fantastic contexts.

“I want your senses to become very keen to their surroundings,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1963.

“When I am served a plate of food, I see shapes and forms, and I sometimes don’t know whether to eat the food or look at it,” he said. In May 2009, a 1976 Oldenburg sculpture, Typewriter Eraser, sold for a record $2.2 million US at an auction of post-war and contemporary art in New York.

Early in his career, he was a key developer of “soft sculpture” made out of vinyl — another way of transforming ordinary objects — and also helped invent the quintessential 1960s art event, the “Happening.”

Among his most famous large sculptures are Clothespin,a 45-foot steel clothespin installed near Philadelphia’s City Hall in 1976, and Batcolumn, a 100-foot lattice-work steel baseball bat installed the following year in front of a federal office building in Chicago.

“It’s always a matter of interpretation, but I tend to look at all my works as being completely pure,” Oldenburg told the Chicago Tribune in 1977, shortly before Batcolumn was dedicated.

“That’s the adventure of it: to take an object that’s highly impure and see it as pure. That’s the fun.”

Among Oldenburg’s other monumental projects: Crusoe Umbrella, for the Civic Center in Des Moines, Iowa, completed in 1979; Flashlight, 1981, University of Las Vegas; and Tumbling Tacks, Oslo, 2009.

Oldenburg was born in 1929 in Stockholm, Sweden, son of a diplomat. But young Claes (pronounced klahs) spent much of his childhood in Chicago, where his father served as Swedish consul general for many years. Oldenburg eventually became a U.S. citizen.

As a young man, he studied at Yale and the Art Institute of Chicago and worked for a time at Chicago’s City News Bureau.

He settled in New York by the late 1950s, but at times also lived in France and California.