Claes Oldenburg, pop artist who grew up in Chicago, dies at 93
NEW YORK (CBS/AP) -- 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 – who grew up in Chicago – died Monday morning in New York City, 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.
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, Gosta, served as Swedish consul general for many years. Oldenburg eventually became a U.S. citizen.
Oldenburg attended the Latin School of Chicago in the Gold Coast, and attended college at Yale University from 1946 until 1950 before returning to Chicago and studying at The School of the Art Institute.
Oldenburg also dipped his toes into the world of journalism in Chicago – working as a reporter for the City News Bureau. The legendary local wire service also counted Mike Royko, Seymour Hirsh, and Kurt Vonnegut among its many famous alums.
Meanwhile, his biography notes, Oldenburg opened a studio and enjoyed some of his first sales at the 57th Street Art Fair in the Hyde Park neighborhood. He moved to New York City in 1956.
Oldenburg's first blaze of publicity came in the early 60s, 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 séance and twice as exasperating as a game of charades."
Oldenburg's sculpture was also becoming known during this period, particularly ones in which objects such as a telephone or electric mixer were rendered in soft, pliable vinyl. "The telephone is a very sexy shape," Oldenburg told the Los Angeles Times.
One of his early large-scale works was "Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks," which juxtaposed a large lipstick on tracks resembling those that propel Army tanks. The original — with its undertone suggestion to "make love (lipstick) not war (tanks)" — was commissioned by students and faculty and installed at Yale in 1969.
The original version deteriorated and was replaced by a steel, aluminum, and fiberglass version in another spot on the Yale campus in 1974.
In Chicago, Oldenburg's best-known work is "Batcolumn" (1977), a 100-foot lattice-work steel baseball bat that stands outside the Harold Washington Social Security Center at 600 W. Madison St. in the West Loop Gate. As the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events put it:
"Chicago's skyscrapers, chimney stacks, neo-classical columns, steel bridge cross-bracing and construction cranes inspired the design of Claes Oldenburg's heroic-scaled, lattice-shell baseball bat sculpture. On observing Chicago's flat terrain, the Swedish-born artist once commented, "the real art here is architecture, or anything that really stands up."
"Batcolumn" was funded by the federal government as part of a program to include a budget for artworks whenever a big federal building was put up. It took its place not far from Chicago's famed Picasso sculpture, dedicated in 1967.
"Batcolumn," Oldenburg told the Tribune, "attempts to be as nondecorative as possible — straightforward, structural and direct. This, I think, is also a part of Chicago: a very factual and realistic object. The final thing, though, was to have it against the sky, that's what it was made for."
He had considered making it red, but "color would have simply distracted from the linear effect. Now, the more buildings they tear down around here, the better it will get."
Chicagoans weren't uniformly pleased. At around the same time as the sympathetic Tribune interview, another Tribune writer, architecture critic Paul Gapp, decried the trend toward "idiotic public sculpture" and called Oldenburg "a veteran put-on man and poseur who long ago convinced the Art Establishment that he was to be taken seriously."
Among Oldenburg's other famous large sculptures are "Clothespin," a 45-foot steel clothespin installed near Philadelphia's City Hall in 1976; the 1988 "Spoonbridge and Cherry" sculpture outside of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; "Crusoe Umbrella," for the Civic Center in Des Moines, Iowa, completed in 1979; "Flashlight," 1981, University of Las Vegas; and "Tumbling Tacks," Oslo, 2009.
"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."
Many of Oldenburg's later works were produced in collaboration with his second wife, 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 out during their marriage in the 1960s, doing the sewing on his soft sculptures.
While Oldenburg remained in New York after moving there in 1956, he at times has also lived in France and California.
