His death was confirmed by Adriana Elgarresta, a representative of Pace Gallery in New York, which, along with Paula Cooper Gallery, has long represented him. Mr. Oldenburg entered the New York art scene in earnest in the late 1950s, embracing the then-fashionable “Happenings” and pushing the boundaries of art with shows that incorporated things like signs, wire and plaster clothing, even and pieces of pie. His approach to everyday objects, interpretation and collaboration has continued to influence generations of artists. An early work, “The Store” (1961), opened in an East Village storefront and sold absurd plaster facsimiles of everyday objects — like a shoe or a comic book cheeseburger, covered only with the recognizable blobs and improvised dashes of Abstract Expressionism . As he became increasingly focused on sculpture, he began to increase the scale of his work, starting with ordinary objects such as hamburgers, ice cream cones and household appliances and then enlarging them to unknown, often imposing dimensions. One of his most famous installations, erected in 1976 – the twentieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence – is “Clothespin”, a 45-foot-tall, 10-ton steel black sculpture, just what the title suggests, with a metal spring that aptly alludes to number 76. The work stands in stark contrast to conventional public sculpture, which Mr. Oldenburg, impersonating a municipal official, said was supposed to include “bulls and Greeks and a lot of nekka platyskas.” Mr. Oldenburg was heavily influenced by the French artist Jean Dubuffet, who brought so-called Outsider art to galleries and museums, upending the status quo of institutional art. But like many Pop artists, Mr. Oldenburg also took cues from Marcel Duchamp, whose so-called ready-made sculptures from the early 20th century were actually ordinary mass-produced objects (a bicycle wheel, a urinal). Mr. Oldenburg’s sculptures, however, were handmade rather than store-bought, and he wanted them to be, as he put it, “as mysterious as nature.” “My intention is to make an everyday object that defies definition,” he once said. He rarely depicted people. Instead, he focused on objects closely related to human needs and desires. “I have consistently expressed myself in objects with reference to human beings rather than through human beings,” he said. As the art dealer Arne Glimcher, who has known and worked with Mr. Oldenburg since the early 1960s, said in an interview Monday, “His work was almost psychoanalytic.” Mr. Glimcher noted that the exact plans served as the basis for Mr. Oldenburg’s work. “He was an editor comparable to Ingres or Picasso,” he said, but “with the audacity to mix things up.” His most important contribution to sculpture, Mr. Glimcher said, was transforming it from something hard, such as bronze or wood, into something soft. The sculptures would deflate, and Mr. Glimcher recalled Mr. Oldenburg instructing his associates to “deflate them.” 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 powerful, and over time the work got bigger. He would take a simple idea and expand on it.” Claes Thure Oldenburg was born in Stockholm on January 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 Sweden’s consul general in Chicago, where Claes grew up and attended the Chicago Latin School. 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 in the modernist school Bauhaus 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 who drew professional comics. 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 papier-mâché objects. His first major shows in New York were The Street (1960), which consisted of cars, signs and human figures made of cardboard and burlap, and The Shop (1961), for which he opened his studio, then occupying a storefront on the Lower East Side, to visitors, bringing art and commerce together in the artist’s studio. Items for sale included sandwiches, slices of pie, sausages and clothing made from wire and plaster and painted in an exuberant glossy style reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism. His work quickly grew in scale. In 1960, Mr. Oldenburg married Patti Mucha, an artist who became his first collaborator and appeared in his films. He made designs of the objects he would turn into sculptures, such as his famous “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 the Happenings of Jim Dine, Robert Whitman, Simone Forti and other artists. But Mr. Oldenburg thought even further, sketching proposals for monuments such as “Fans at the site of the Statue of Liberty,” “Plan for a nose-shaped tunnel entrance” and a couple. of Scissors in Motion, to replace the Washington Monument. His first “Colosseum Monument,” as he called this type of work, was “Lipstick (Rising) on Caterpillar Tracks.” Here a huge tube of lipstick made of vinyl and mounted on tractor wheels, with obvious phallic and military overtones, rolled onto Yale’s campus in 1969 as Vietnam War protests and the student movement rocked colleges and universities across the country. Vincent Scully, the Yale architecture scholar and “Lipstick” champion, later described the scene as “a good deal like Petrograd, 1917.” “Lipstick” was made of steel in 1974 and placed at Yale in the courtyard of the residential Morse College. In his early years in New York, Mr. Oldenburg met artists such as Alan Carrow, George Segal and Robert Whitman, and participated in the Happenings that would blossom into performance art. He renamed his studio The Ray Gun Theater in 1962 and performed there on weekends. In 1965, he rented out the pool at a health club for an event called “Washes,” which featured colored balloons and people floating in the pool. Two decades later, Mr. Oldenburg was still combining art and theater. In 1985, in collaboration with Dutch writer and curator Coosje van Bruggen and architect Frank Gehry, he organized an elaborate spectacle on land and water in Venice called “The Course of the Knife”, featuring a ship shaped like a Swiss army knife. as its focus. Mr Oldenburg had met Ms van Bruggen after his divorce from Ms Mucha in 1970. Ms van Bruggen was on staff 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 oversized garden tool installed on the grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands. The couple married in 1977. They collaborated on more than 40 works, including “Spoonbridge and Cherry,” from 1985 to 1988, at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, and “Giant Binoculars” (1991), which was incorporated into the design by Mr. Gehry for the Chiat-Day Building in Venice, California. Mr. Oldenburg is survived by two stepchildren, Paulus Kapteyn and Maartje Oldenburg, and three grandchildren. Ms van Bruggen died of breast cancer in 2009 aged 66. His brother, Richard E. Oldenburg, director of the Museum of Modern Art from 1972 to 1994, died in 2018 at the age of 84. In addition to his sculptural commissions, Mr. Oldenburg was the subject of several solo exhibitions, including one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1969. In 1995, the National Gallery in Washington and the Guggenheim Museum in New York jointly organized the retrospective “Claes Oldenburg: 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 associated with 1960s Pop Art, he saw his monumental renderings of humble objects as more than simple celebrations of the mundane. “A catalog might be made of all these objects,” he is quoted as saying, “which would read like a list of the deities or things to which our modern mythological thought has been projected. We invest religious feelings in our objects. Look how beautifully the objects are depicted in the advertisements in the Sunday papers.’ 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, acquire appeal and mean something. “They were prophetic,” he said of Mr. Oldenburg’s sculptures. “They were sociological statements.” Danielle Cruz contributed reporting.
