Remembering Claes Oldenburg: He created playful and monumental art out of everyday objects.

Claes Oldenburg:
Giant Shuttlecocks, Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, Kansas City, Mo.

I was saddened to learn of the recent death of Claes Oldenburg, the Swedish-born American sculptor, who delighted in creating large replicas of everyday objects. They were designed to be playful and monumental, and yes, they are all gigantic in stature and attention grabbers.

The 93-year-old Oldenburg’s public art installations include: a diaper pin, badminton shuttlecocks, a spoon and cherry, a clothespin, an ice cream cone, even an old-fashioned typewriter eraser. These visual art works and others just as playful and monumental created by Oldenburg dot the urban landscapes of many major U.S. cities, including San Francisco, Kansas City, Minneapolis and Seattle.

It wasn’t until I caught a glimpse of Corridor Pin, Blue in 2013, during a visit to the de Young Fine Arts Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, that I realized I had seen many of Oldenburg’s public art installations during my U.S. travels this millennium.

I’ve seen the Giant Shuttlecocks on the pristine front lawn of the Nelson-Atkinson Museum of Art in Kansas City, the Spoonbridge and Cherry that highlights the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden at the Walker Art Center, and the Typewriter Eraser, Scale X at the Olympic Sculpture Garden in Seattle. Since moving east, I’ve also seen another version of Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser, Scale X at the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., too.

Among other Oldenburg sculptures, Chicago, where the artist grew up, has an Oldenburg baseball bat and there’s a fruit bowl in Miami. Meanwhile, Cleveland has a giant stamp, and Las Vegas is home to a flashlight. In Philadelphia, there’s a 45-foot-high clothespin that is displayed across the street from City Hall.

Lo and behold, San Francisco is home to not only the giant diaper pin sculpture. It is also where Cupid’s Span, a 60-foot-high painted fiberglass and stainless-steel sculpture created by Oldenburg and Coojse Van Brugge, his wife and collaborator of more than a quarter of a century, dropped anchor and took up residence along the Embarcadero waterfront in 2002. It certainly changed the look and landscape when it premiered.

I’ve walked by and admired Cupid’s Span numerous times over the years, when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, and photographed it from many different angles. Each time, it seemed, there’s something different about it. Once, I was lucky enough to capture the bow and area while it was covered in fog.

On the occasion of the unveiling of Cupid’s Span, Oldenburg told the San Francisco Chronicle: 

“At first there’s the man-in-the-street opinion, but then there’s the more nuanced response. 

“We don’t copy the objects we use, we try to transform them and we hope they go on transforming as you look at them. The idea of endless public dialogue – visual dialogue – is very important to us.”

In remembering Oldenburg, who died Monday at his Manhattan home, The New York Times wrote that the artist “revolutionized our idea what a public monument could be. In lieu of bronze sculptures of men on horseback, or long-forgotten patriots standing on a pedestal, hand over heart, orating through the ages, Oldenburg filled our civic spaces with nostalgia-soaked objects inflated to absurdist proportions. It is interesting that so many of his subject are culled from the realm of the home and traditional female pursuits. His sculpture of a lipstick case or a garden spade, his ‘Clothespin’ or nearby it, his ‘Split Button’ sculpture (a beloved meeting place at the University of Pennsylvania) – all are based on the type of objects that could be found at the bottom of our mother’s purses.”

Whether or not Oldenburg had a social agenda behind his public art installations didn’t matter to me. I found his Pop Art both visually colorful and admiring. And, as Oldenburg once explained to former San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker: “Just the fact that you can put up something beautiful and complex in a city is a social statement to itself.”

All photographs: © Michael Dickens.