The Artist Claes Oldenburg, Who Created Huge Urban Sculptures, Dies At The Age Of 93
With his outsized sculptures of a baseball bat, a clothespin, and several other objects, Claes Oldenburg turned the mundane into the monumental through his outsized sculptures of the everyday. He died at the age of 93.
Maartje Oldenburg, the daughter of Oldenburg, told the Times that her father died on Monday morning in Manhattan. Having fallen and broken his hip a month ago, he had been in poor health ever since.
By involving ordinary items in fantastic contexts, Oldenburg took inspiration from a variety of sources, such as sculptors’ eternal fascination with form, dadaists’ breakthrough concept of bringing readymade products into the realm of art, and pop artists’ ironic fascination with lowbrow culture – by reimagining ordinary items in fantastic settings.
The Artist Claes Oldenburg, Who Created Huge Urban Sculptures, Dies At The Age Of 93
In 1963, when he was writing a column for the Los Angeles Times, he stated, “I want you to become very sensitive to your surroundings.”.
“I sometimes have trouble deciding whether I should eat or look at food when I am served a plate of food because I see shapes and forms on the plate,” he explained.
In May 2009, Oldenburg’s “Typewriter Eraser,” a sculpture executed in 1976 and sold at an auction in New York of postwar and contemporary art, broke a record by selling for $2.2 million.
A key founder of the 1960s art phenomena, the “Happening,” he helped invent the quintessential 1960s art event and create the soft sculptures that were made out of vinyl – another way to transform ordinary objects – and he was a key contributor to the “soft sculpture” movement.
His most famous large sculptures are “Clothespin,” a 45-foot steel clothespin installed near Philadelphia City Hall in 1976, and “Batcolumn,” a 100-foot lattice-work steel baseball bat erected in front of the Chicago Federal Building the following year, and among the most widely known of them are “Clothespin” and “Batcolumn.”
Regardless of the interpretation, I feel that all of my works are completely pure, and I don’t think it is a matter of interpretation,” Oldenburg told the Chicago Tribune in 1977 before “Batcolumn” was dedicated to the public.
There’s something thrilling about taking something that’s highly impure and making it seem pure. That’s what makes it an adventure. It’s all about having fun. That’s what it’s all about.”
It was through the placement of these sculptures that the establishment ironically championed the once-outsider art – though still provoking a great deal of controversy – as the monument-sized pieces were placed in front of government and corporate buildings.
His subsequent works were produced in collaboration with one of his second wives, Coosje van Bruggen, a Dutch-born art historian, painter, and critic who he married in 1977, and together they produced many of his later works. Her assistance had made it possible for him to complete the installation of his 41-foot sculpture, “Trowel I,” which was installed in Otterlo, the Netherlands, the year before.
In January of 2009, Van Bruggen passed away from a heart attack.
While Oldenburg was married to Pat, a fellow artist, in the 1960s, she assisted him with the sewing of the soft sculptures he was creating during that time.
The Happening began to appear in the artier precincts of Manhattan during the early 1960s when an art form known as performance art that Oldenburg had been involved in called the Happening made its first blaze of publicity.
Described as an “outrageous entertainment” in a 1962 article in the New York Times, it was described as “time-consuming, intellectual, and double-exasperating than a game of charades and more psychological than a twist.”
According to Michael Kirby’s 1965 book, “Happenings,” one Oldenburg device was juxtaposing American and European cultural ideas in one artwork, including a man reciting Shakespeare soundlessly, a trombonist playing “My Country Is Yours,” a woman climbing a ladder laden with tools and a man scooping sand from a cot, among other oddities, all within a six-minute period.
In his statement to the Times, Oldenburg said, “There is no story here, and the events are meaningless to me.”. In his statement to the Times, Oldenburg said, “But there is a disorganized pattern that acquires definition during a performance.” Oldenburg asserted that the sessions should be a “cathartic experience for both the performers and the audience.”.
It was also during this period that Oldenburg’s sculptures began to gain a level of recognition, particularly those that used soft, pliable vinyl to render objects such as telephones or electric mixers. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Oldenburg said: “The telephone is a very sexy shape,”
He juxtaposed a large lipstick on a track resembling those used by the Army in order to propel tanks in one of his earliest large-scale works, “Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks.”. It is thought that the original was commissioned by students and faculty and installed at Yale University in 1969 as a message to “make love (lipstick) not war (tanks).” He stated in the original: “It is time to make love (lip
As a result of deterioration, the original version of the monument was replaced in 1974 by steel, aluminum, and fiberglass version located at another spot on Yale’s campus.
This 45-foot-long steel sculpture by Oldenburg was installed outside Philadelphia’s City Hall in 1976 as part of his “Clothespin” project. I am reminded of Constantin Brancusi’s semi-abstract depiction of a man and a woman embracing eyeball to eyeball in 1908, which was inspired by Brancusi’s “The Kiss”. There are two halves to the “Clothespin”, and they face each other as Brancusi’s lovers do in the manner in which they face each other.
Whenever a large federal building was built, there was a budget included for artworks to be incorporated into the design of the building, one of which was the Chicago “Batcolumn”. There is no doubt that the sculpture has pride of place next to Chicago’s legendary Picasso sculpture, which was dedicated in 1967.
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Oldenburg told the newspaper that Batcolumn aims at being as nondecorative as possible – a straightforward, structural, and direct form of writing. As I see it, this is also one of the characteristics of Chicago: a very real object in terms of its facts and details. As for the final thing, though, it was to have it against the sky, since that is what it was designed for.”
There had been thought of making it red, but he decided that this would only distract from the linear effect that he was seeking. As they tear down more and more buildings around here, the better it will be since there will be no more buildings here.”
There was no universal approval among Chicagoans regarding the decision. A sympathetic Tribune writer, Paul Gapp, decried the trend of public sculptures that are irrational and unjust and described Oldenburg as “a veteran put-on man and poseur who has persuaded the Art Establishment that he deserves to be taken seriously by the public.” Around the same time as the sympathetic Tribune interview, another Tribune writer, architecture critic William Woodward, attacked the trend of “idiotic public sculptures.”
There are many other monumental projects by Oldenburg, including “Crusoe Umbrella,” done by him for the Civic Center in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1979; “Flashlight,” created by him for the University of Las Vegas in 1981; and “Tumbling Tacks,” completed by him in Oslo in 2009.
The Swedish politician and artist Oldenburg was born in 1929 in the city of Stockholm, the son of a diplomat. As a child, Claes (pronounced class) spent the majority of his childhood in Chicago where his father, a former Swedish consul general, served for many years as the city’s consul general. He was eventually naturalized as a U.S. citizen and became a member of the military.
When he was young, he studied at Yale and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, and he also worked for a time for Chicago’s City News Bureau while he was studying at Yale. It is believed that he settled in New York by the end of the 1950s, but he has also lived in France and California at various times in the past.