Claes Oldenburg, Public Art Sculptor

Claes Oldenburg (born January 28, 1929) is an American sculptor,

best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen. Van Bruggen died in 2009 after 32 years of marriage. Oldenburg lives and works in New York

Many of Oldenburg’s large-scale sculptures of mundane objects elicited ridicule before being accepted. For example, the 1969 Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, was removed from its original place in Beinecke Plaza at Yale University, and “circulated on a loan basis to other campuses”.With its “bright color, contemporary form and material and its ignoble subject, it attacked the sterility and pretentiousness of the classicistic building behind it.

” The artist “pointed out it opposed levity to solemnity, color to colorlessness, metal to stone, simple to asophisticated tradition. In theme, it is both phallic, life-engendering, and a bomb, the harbinger of death. Male in form, it is female in subject…”One of a number of sculptures that have interactive capabilities, it now resides in the Morse College courtyard.