The Subjective Objects of Claes Oldenburg

Reflecting on the life and works of an artist who elevated the everyday and freed us from the power of things

Often referred to as ‘the soft sculpture guy’, Claes Oldenburg is best remembered for his monumental Pop Art in public spaces — for making the unremarkable remarkable and changing our relationship with everyday things. After all, it’s the ‘little things’ that sometimes matter most…

‘Flying Pins’ (2000) public art by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, photographed in 2010 by Maurizio Pesce [view license]

Privileged beginnings and a Punk ethos preceded the Pop aesthetic that remains deceptively profound... Oldenburg was the son of Sweden’s Consul General to Chicago and grew up attending private school before going on to study Literature and Art History at Yale. On his return to Chicago, he enrolled at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. With this solid grounding in art, he then moved to New York and worked as a librarian at the the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration, part of the Smithsonian Museum of Design, enabling him to continue self-guided study. This was in the mid-1950s when the New York scene was dominated by Abstract Expressionism, but Claes knew things could do with a good shake-up to avoid creative stagnation.

He settled in Lower Manhattan and found himself among a group of like-minded avant-garde rebels who gathered around the…