Taking ordinary objects like hamburgers and household items, he sculpted them in unfamiliar, often imposing dimensions — what he called his “Colossal Monuments.”
His death was confirmed by Adriana Elgarresta, a spokeswoman for the Pace gallery in New York, which, along with the Paula Cooper Gallery, has long represented him.
Mr. Oldenburg entered the New York art scene in earnest in the late 1950s, embracing the audience-participation “Happenings” then in vogue and expanding the boundaries of art with shows that incorporated things like street signs, wire-and-plaster clothing and even pieces of pie. His approach to everyday objects, performance and collaboration has continued to influence generations of artists.
An early project, “The Store” (1961), opened in a storefront in the East Village and sold absurd plaster facsimiles of everyday objects — like a shoe or a cheeseburger out of a comic strip, only covered with the recognizable drips and improvisational dashes of Abstract Expressionism.
As he focused more and more on sculpture, he began increasing the scale of his work, taking as his starting point ordinary objects like hamburgers, ice cream cones and household appliances and then enlarging them to unfamiliar, often imposing dimensions.
Mr. Oldenburg was heavily influenced by the French artist Jean Dubuffet, who brought so-called Outsider art into galleries and museums, upsetting the status quo of institutional art. But like many Pop artists, Mr. Oldenburg also took cues from Marcel Duchamp, whose so-called readymade sculptures from the early 20th century were actually ordinary, mass-produced objects (a bicycle wheel, a urinal). Mr. Oldenburg’s sculptures, however, were handcrafted rather than store-bought, and he wanted them to be, as he put it, “just as mysterious as nature.”
“My intention is to make an everyday object that eludes definition,” he once said. He rarely depicted people; instead he focused on items closely associated with human needs and desires. “I’ve expressed myself consistently in objects with reference to human beings rather than through human beings,” he said. As the art dealer Arne Glimcher, who knew and worked with Mr. Oldenburg since the early 1960s put it in an interview on Monday, “His work was almost psychoanalytic.”
His most important contribution to sculpture, Mr. Glimcher said, was turning it from something hard, like bronze or wood, to something soft. The sculptures would deflate, and Mr. Glimcher recalled Mr. Oldenburg instructing his associates to “fluff them up.”
Paula Cooper, the New York art dealer who co-represented Mr. Oldenburg for many years, said of his everyday sculptures: “They were funky but always formally strong, and over time the work became grander. He would take a simple idea and expand it.”
Claes Thure Oldenburg was born in Stockholm on Jan. 28, 1929, the son of Gosta and Sigrid Elisabeth (Lindforss) Oldenburg. His father, a diplomat, had postings in London, Berlin, Oslo and New York before being appointed in 1936 as the Swedish consul general in Chicago, where Claes grew up and attended the Latin School of Chicago.
Mr. Oldenburg studied literature and art history at Yale University from 1946 to 1950. He returned to the Midwest to study at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1950s with the painter Paul Wieghardt, a student of Paul Klee’s at the modernist Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany. During his early years in art school, Mr. Oldenburg worked for the City News Bureau of Chicago, where one of his duties included drawing comic strips. He was the only major artist associated with Pop Art to have drawn comics professionally.
Mr. Oldenburg became a United States citizen in 1953 and moved to New York in 1956. His first exhibition, at the Judson Gallery in May 1959, included drawings, collages and objects made of papier-mâché.
In 1960, Mr. Oldenburg married Patty Mucha, an artist who became his first collaborator and appeared in his films. He would make drawings of the objects he would turn into sculptures, like his famed “soft” sculptures, made of canvas and later vinyl, filled with foam, and Ms. Mucha, for the most part, sewed them. “Floor Cake” and “Floor Burger,” both from 1962, led to a “Giant Toothpaste Tube” and an entire “Bathroom” installed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969.
He also participated in Happenings by Jim Dine, Robert Whitman, Simone Forti and other artists.
His first realized “Colossal Monument,” as he called this type of work, was “Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks.” Here a giant tube of lipstick fabricated in vinyl and mounted on tractor wheels, with obvious phallic and military overtones, was rolled onto Yale’s campus in 1969 at the moment Vietnam War protests and the student movement were rocking colleges and universities across the country.
Vincent Scully, the Yale architecture scholar and a champion of “Lipstick,” later described the scene as “a good deal like Petrograd, 1917.” “Lipstick” was fabricated in steel in 1974 and installed at Yale in the courtyard of the residential Morse College.
Mr. Oldenburg had met Ms. van Bruggen after he and Ms. Mucha divorced in 1970. Ms. van Bruggen was a staff member at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam at the time. Mr. Oldenburg’s first collaboration with her was in 1976, on the final version of “Trowel I,” an oversize garden implement installed on the grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands.
Mr. Oldenburg is survived by two stepchildren, Paulus Kapteyn and Maartje Oldenburg, and three grandchildren. Ms. van Bruggen died of breast cancer in 2009 at 66. His brother, Richard E. Oldenburg, the director of the Museum of Modern Art from 1972 to 1994, died in 2018 at 84.
In addition to his sculptural commissions, Mr. Oldenburg was the subject of many solo exhibitions, including one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969. In 1995, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Guggenheim Museum in New York jointly organized the retrospective “Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology.” His and Ms. van Bruggen’s work is in the collections of most major modern art museums in the United States and Europe.
While Mr. Oldenburg’s work is most often linked to the Pop Art of the 1960s, he saw his monumental versions of humble objects as more than just celebrations of the mundane.
“A catalog could be made of all such objects,” he was quoted as saying, “which would read like a list of the deities or things on which our contemporary mythological thinking has been projected. We do invest religious emotion in our objects. Look at how beautifully objects are depicted in ads in Sunday newspapers.”
Mr. Glimcher, in the interview, went further, seeing Mr. Oldenburg as an observer of an American culture in which certain objects, even the humble telephone, hamburger or ice cream cone, gain traction and mean something. “They were prophetic,” he said of Mr. Oldenburg’s sculptures. “They were sociological statements.”
Danielle Cruz contributed reporting.
NEW YORK TIMES
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