Claes Oldenburg, the pop artist behind Kansas City’s shuttlecocks, dies at 93
Pop artist Claes Oldenburg, who created the iconic shuttlecock sculptures displayed on the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, has died at age 93.
The massive shuttlecocks, which he designed with his wife and fellow sculptor Coosje van Bruggen, have become a symbol for Kansas City since they were installed in 1994. Oldenburg was known for turning the mundane into the monumental through his outsized sculptures of a baseball bat, a clothespin and other objects.
Oldenburg died Monday morning in Manhattan, 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.
“I want your senses to become very keen to their surroundings,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1963.
Early in his career, he was a key developer of “soft sculpture” made out of vinyl – another way of transforming ordinary objects – and also helped invent the quintessential 1960s art event, the “Happening.”
Among his most famous large sculptures are “Clothespin,” a 45-foot steel clothespin installed near Philadelphia’s City Hall in 1976, and “Batcolumn,” a 100-foot lattice-work steel baseball bat installed the following year in front of a federal office building in Chicago.
“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.”
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 seance and twice as exasperating as a game of charades.”
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 served as Swedish consul general for many years. Oldenburg eventually became a U.S. citizen.
As a young man, he studied at Yale and the Art Institute of Chicago and worked for a time at Chicago’s City News Bureau. He settled in New York by the late 1950s, but at times has also lived in France and California.
This report includes reporting from the Associated Press and biographical material written by former AP staffer Polly Anderson.
This story was originally published July 18, 2022 at 12:46 PM.
