Artist revealed monumental potential in ordinary objects

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 ready-made 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.

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 the 45foot steel “Clothespin,” installed near Philadelphia’s City Hall in 1976, and “Batcolumn,” a 100-foot latticework 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. “That’s the adventure of it: to take an object that’s highly impure and see it as pure. That’s the fun.”

The placement of those sculptures showed how his monument-sized items — though still provoking much controversy — took their place in front of public and corporate buildings as the establishment ironically championed the once-outsider art.

Many of Oldenburg’s later works were produced in collaboration with his second wife, Coosje van Bruggen, a Dutch-born art historian, artist and critic whom he married in 1977. The previous year, she had helped him install his 41-foot “Trowel I” on the grounds of the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands.

Van Bruggen died in January 2009.

Oldenburg’s first wife, Pat, also an artist, helped him during their marriage in the 1960s, doing the sewing on his soft sculptures.

Oldenburg’s first blaze of publicity came in the early 1960s, when a type of performance art called the Happening began to crop up in the artier precincts of Manhattan.

A 1962 New York Times article described it as “a far-out entertainment more sophisticated than the twist, more psychological than a seance and twice as exasperating as a game of charades.”

One Oldenburg concoction, cited in the 1965 book “Happenings” by Michael Kirby, juxtaposed a man in flippers soundlessly reciting Shakespeare, a trombonist playing “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” a young woman laden with tools climbing a ladder, a man shoveling sand from a cot and other oddities, all in one six-minute segment.

“There is no story and the events are seemingly meaningless,” Oldenburg told the Times. “But there is a disorganized pattern that acquires definition during a performance.” He said the sessions — unscripted but loosely planned in advance — should be a “cathartic experience for us as well as the audience.”

Oldenburg was born Jan. 28, 1929, in Stockholm, Sweden, son of a diplomat, but 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.

KATE OWEN/THE NEW YORK TIMES Claes Oldenburg sits in his New York studio with two of his sculptures. The Swedish-born American Pop artist died Monday at age 93.