Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg, the Swedish-born American Pop artist known for his monumental sculptures of everyday objects, died on Monday July 18 2022 at his home and studio in the SoHo section of Manhattan. He was 93. Mr. Oldenburg entered the New York art scene in earnest in the late 1950s. As he focused more and more on sculpture, he began increasing the scale of his work, One of his most famous installations, erected in 1976 — the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence — is “Clothespin,” a 45-foot-high, 10-ton black steel sculpture of precisely what the title indicates, complete with a metal spring that appropriately evokes the number 76. As the art dealer Arne Glimcher, who knew and worked with Mr. Oldenburg since the early 1960s put it in an interview on Monday, “His work was almost psychoanalytic.” Claes Thure Oldenburg was born in Stockholm on Jan. 28, 1929. 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 Mr. Oldenburg became a United States citizen in 1953 and moved to New York in 1956. In 1960, Mr. Oldenburg married Patty Mucha, an artist who became his first collaborator and appeared in his films. Mr. Oldenburg met Dutch writer and curator Coosje van Bruggenafter he and Ms. Mucha divorced in 1970. Ms. van Bruggen was a staff member at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam at the time. They married in 1977. Mr. Oldenburg is survived by two stepchildren, Paulus Kapteyn and Maartje Oldenburg, and three grandchildren. Ms. van Bruggen died of breast cancer in 2009 at 66. His brother, Richard E. Oldenburg, the director of the Museum of Modern Art from 1972 to 1994, died in 2018 at 84.