Richard's Art Noticeboard: Claes Oldenburg, 1929

Claes Oldenburg carrying Giant Toothpaste Tube (1964), 1966

Claes Oldenburg died on 18 July 2022

Art and artists generally take themselves pretty seriously: art and humour can be a difficult mix. Claes Oldenburg was one of those few artists whose work managed to be at once deeply serious and very funny. His work was original and subversive. Sculpture traditionally is hard: marble, bronze, steel; Oldenburg made it soft. Figurative sculpture conventionally celebrates individuals deemed significant or represents (sometimes questionable) ideals; Oldenburg made monuments of the commonplace and banal: light switches, hamburgers, lavatories, clothes pegs, cigarette butts, spoons… In place of Eros in Piccadilly Circus Oldenburg proposed giant lipsticks, and elsewhere in London he proposed, in homage to the mini skirt, monumental pairs of knees.

Oldenburg’s art emerged in New York with Pop Art in the 1960s, alongside that of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and others. Although Oldenburg retained much of the sensibility of that movement his art matured into a form of civic and monumental sculpture that is unique and impressive. Remarkably, for ideas that might seem on paper to be not just ambitious but plain bonkers, many have been realized in sites around the world: a giant clothes peg in Philadelphia, an inverted ice cream cone on top of a shopping mall in Cologne, an apple core in Jerusalem.

He was also a wonderful draughtsman with a very seductive and fluent line.

It should be noted that Oldenburg’s career was very much a collaborative one. First with Patty Mucha his first wife and later with Coosje van Bruggen, his second wife. All his sculptures after 1981 were signed by Oldenburg and van Bruggen.

Oldenburg leaves a great legacy: how can you not smile at, say, the sight of a 15m long spoon holding a giant cherry?

Obituaries

Bernsten, Fred A. (2022) "Claes Oldenburg, a Whimsical Father of Pop Art, Dies at 93", The Washington Post

Darwent, Charles (2022) "Claes Oldenburg Obituary", The Guardian

Greenberger, Alex (2022) "Claes Oldenburg, Pop Artist Who Monumentalized the Everyday, Dies at 93", ARTnews

Schwendener, Martha (2022) "Claes Oldenburg Dies at 93; Pop Artist Made the Everyday Monumental", The New York Times