"I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum." — Claes Oldenburg, I am for an art (1961)
Claes Oldenburg (January 28, 1929 – July 18, 2022) was a Swedish-born American sculptor and one of the defining figures of Pop Art, whose monumental public works permanently changed what civic sculpture could look like in the late twentieth century. Born in Stockholm to a father in the Swedish consular service, he spent much of his childhood between Sweden, Norway, and the United States, eventually settling with his family in Chicago. He attended Yale University (1946–50), where his primary interests were literature and writing, and worked briefly as an apprentice reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago before enrolling at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952. He took American citizenship in 1953 and moved to New York in 1956.
In New York, his early store environments and "soft sculptures" — outsized, sewn vinyl and canvas versions of typewriters, light switches, hamburgers, electric fans, and toilets — established a distinctive Pop vocabulary in which familiar objects were rendered absurd, sensual, and unsettling. From his 1977 marriage to the Dutch art historian Coosje van Bruggen onward, he produced a long sequence of monumental public sculptures in collaboration with her, including Spoonbridge and Cherry (1985–88) at the Walker Art Center's Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Clothespin (1976) in Philadelphia, among many others on three continents. His work is held in essentially every significant collection of postwar art, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, the Walker Art Center, and the Guggenheim Museum, which mounted a major retrospective of his work in 1995.