Claes Oldenburg, Pop artist, 1929-2022

When Pop artist Claes Oldenburg declared he was “for an art that is political-erotic-mystical”, he announced himself as a dissident in a movement otherwise defined by its passion for mass consumption. Yet Oldenburg, who has died aged 93 in New York, managed to unite his loftier tendencies with Pop’s celebration of all that is cheap, cartoonish and commodifiable, and without betraying either cause.

The Swedish-born sculptor is best known for gargantuan replicas of everyday objects including ice cream cones, light switches, hamburgers and clothes pegs. Had a 1966 sketch of Oldenburg’s been realised, a cluster of monumental lipsticks would have displaced the neoclassical winged figure of Eros from Piccadilly Circus in central London. As phallic as they are feminised, the lipstick tubes also had a resemblance to military munitions, a jibe at America’s involvement in Vietnam. Today a successor of the London concept graces a college courtyard at Yale University.

Other signature sculptures include “Spoonbridge and Cherry” (1988), which he and Coosje van Bruggen, his long-term collaborator and wife, were commissioned to make by the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis. Swooping across an ornamental lake, the 50ft-long spoon bears a glowing red cherry perched at an impossible angle. Dangerous, decadent, uncanny and mundane, it marks Oldenburg and van Bruggen as latter-day Lewis Carrolls who leave their audience uncertain whether they are having a ball at the Mad Hatter’s tea party or are in the sinister clutches of the Red Queen.

Claes Oldenburg was born in Stockholm on January 28 1929. His father, Gösta, was a diplomat. His mother, Sigrid Elisabeth Lindforss, was an opera singer and abstract painter. In 1936, the family moved to Chicago and, after attending the Latin School of Chicago, Oldenburg studied literature and art history at Yale, before a stint at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. By 1956, three years after he acquired US citizenship, he was based in New York.

Although North American art was in the grip of abstract expressionism — emotional, heroic, gestural — Oldenburg identified with a new generation. These young guns, including Jasper Johns, Jim Dine and Robert Rauschenberg, sought images that were tougher, jauntier, in tune with the cars-and-comic-strips vibe of mid-century America.

In 1961, Oldenburg captured the zeitgeist for art as consumable when he turned his studio into The Store, where he sold plaster replicas of slices of blueberry pie, underwear and ice creams. A year later, for an exhibition at the Green Gallery, he made the same items in canvas but inflated their proportions.

Although the public were dazzled by these squishy, seductive japes, some critics balked. According to Peter Selz, leviathan foodstuffs “seem to cater to infantile personalities capable only of ingesting, not of digesting”.

But Oldenburg was unstoppable. A solo show at MoMA, the first devoted to a Pop artist, in 1969 was followed by a slew of major exhibitions, including one organised by New York’s Guggenheim museum and Washington’s National Gallery of Art in 1995.

From the 1970s, his giant sculptures colonised cityscapes including Milan, where he adorned the Piazzale Cadorna with a needle and thread for mighty fingers in 2000, and Cologne, where he left a mammoth ice cream cone to melt on top of a shopping centre in 2001.

Oldenburg didn’t work alone. The sewing skills of his first wife, Patty Mucha, whom he married in 1960, were essential to those early canvas sculptures. Later, he worked alongside van Bruggen, whom he married in 1977. Before she died of breast cancer in 2009, she and Oldenburg signed more than 40 works together. Oldenburg is survived by two stepchildren, Paulus Kapteyn and Maartje Oldenburg. His brother, Richard Oldenburg, who died in 2018, served as the director of MoMA from 1972 to 1994.

Today, Oldenburg’s influence spans generations. In 2011, artist film-maker Tacita Dean made a touching film showing Oldenburg as he potters through shelves of humble ephemera. Meanwhile his penchant for blowing unremarkable objects out of all proportion has been inherited by Swiss sculptor Urs Fischer.

Described by the critic Robert Hughes as “the thinking person’s Walt Disney”, Oldenburg’s deification of the lowly and lightweight cocked a snook at tradition. (He derided classicism as “bulls and Greeks and lots of nekkid broads”). Yet his tongue-in-cheek elevation of the transient and tacky also hints at nostalgia for a nobler, lost age.