Oldenburg, Claes

Oldenburg, Claes (1929– ). Swedish-born sculptor and graphic artist who became an American citizen in 1953, a leading figure of Pop art. He was born in Stockholm, the son of a consular official. His father's diplomatic duties took the family to New York in 1929–33 and Oslo in 1933–6 before they settled in Chicago in 1936. Oldenburg studied art and literature at Yale University, 1946–50, then returned to Chicago, where he took courses at the Art Institute whilst earning his living with part-time jobs as a reporter and illustrator. In 1956 he settled in New York, where he came into contact with a group of young artists including Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, and George Segal, who were in revolt against Abstract Expressionism, and from c. 1958 he was involved in numerous Happenings. Creating the props and costumes for these helped to turn his interest from painting to three-dimensional work—environments as well as sculpture. His inspiration was drawn largely from New York's street life—shop windows, advertisements, graffiti, and so on—and in 1961 he opened ‘The Store', at which he sold painted plaster replicas of domestic objects. This led to the work with which his name is most closely associated—giant sculptures of foodstuffs, typically made of canvas stuffed with foam rubber (Dual Hamburger, MOMA, New York, 1962), and ‘soft sculptures’ of normally hard objects such as typewriters and washbasins, typically made of shiny vinyl. With these he was hailed as one of the leaders of American Pop art. Subsequently Oldenburg has also become well known for projects for colossal monuments—for example, Lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus (Tate Gallery, London, 1966), consisting of a magazine cutting of an array of lipsticks pasted onto a picture postcard. The first of these projects to be realized was a giant lipstick erected at Yale University in 1969. Since 1976, in collaboration with his second wife, the Dutch writer Coosje van Bruggen, Oldenburg has concentrated almost exclusively on such large-scale projects, for example the 20-metre-high Match Cover erected in Barcelona in 1992.