Claes Oldenburg, who transformed everyday objects into imposing sculptures, dies at 93 | Smart News

Claes Oldenburg, whose large-scale public sculptures elevated the mundane and brought art closer to everyday life, died on July 18 at the age of 93.

Over a career spanning six decades, the American Pop Art icon has expanded the definition of public sculpture; his oversized renderings of everyday objects, including a 45-foot-tall steel clothespina 19 foot high typewriter eraser and a 52 foot long spoonare both imposing and idiosyncratic.

It’s really hard to overstate how radical Oldenburg’s work was at the time, Anne ReeveCurator Associated with the Smithsonians Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Custodianrecount Smithsonian magazine. The impulses he first picked up are now all over the art realm. It is impossible to imagine contemporary artists working in a mode that does not take [from] the legacy he established and extended.

Born in 1929, Oldenburg grew up in Stockholm, Sweden and Chicago. He studied literature and art at Yale University and expected become a writer. After graduating, he worked as a journalist in Chicago while studying at the Chicago Art Institute the night.

Oldenburg moved to New York in 1956 and held its first major exhibition, The streetpresenting cardboard and newsprint pieces in 1960. For his next major exhibition, The shop (196164), he creates sculptures of commercial goods: cigarettes, hamburgers, sandwiches.

A second version of The Store Featured similar everyday items (with names like Floor cake and ground burger) made of fabric. These are some of the artists early soft sculptures, which were made canvas or vinyl and filled with foam. For the most part, his then wife, Patty Mucha,sewn these pieces, from her husband’s sketches.

These early works concerned with the scraps and the raw, on the wrecks and wrecks of modern life, by the New York Times Randy Kennedy quickly found an audience. Oldenburg also started to participate in Eventsa precursor to performance art that gained traction in the art world in the 1950s.

Over time, Oldenburg began pushing his experiments with scale (often in conjunction with his second wife, Coosje van Bruggen), creating the sculptures for which he is best known.

As the Time Martha Schwendener writes, Oldenburg saw his monumental versions of humble objects as more than mere celebrations of the mundane.

In the artists’ own words, a catalog could be made of all these objects, which would read like a list of deities or things upon which our contemporary mythological thought has been projected. We invest religious emotion in our objects. Look at how beautifully objects are depicted in Sunday newspaper advertisements.

One of Oldenburg’s first large-scale pieces, which appeared at Yale in 1969, was also a symbol for anti-war activists: a tube of lipstick standing on a military vehicle. Upon installation, the sculpture sparked immense controversy.

It always starts like that, said the artist NPRs Joel Rose in 2011. Newspapers give a bad review. And you would hear a lot of people complaining on the radio. And then it faded. What happened in many cases was that the coin would become a symbol. … His popularity rating would increase. And people got attached to it. This is the status of most of them now.

Today, across the world, the giant apples, toothbrushes and binoculars are immediately recognizable as Oldenburg creations. Often located in public spaces, they serve as familiar landmarks to the general public.

He was really invested in making art living with people, and people were able to recognize something both as a sculpture and as part of their everyday life, Reeve says. I think it was important to him, for example, that art not only exist on the coasts, that it was in places where people who might not have regular access to museums, or who might simply do not go to museums, can still be interested in them.

Reeve, who grew up in the Midwest, remembers walking past spoonbridge and cherry in Minneapolis almost every day. The whimsical image (a spoon, holding a cherry, straddles a pond) stuck in his mind.

Oldenburg, says Reeve, believed that art was something that lived with us, not behind glass or apart from us.