{"id":18957,"date":"2022-07-19T08:54:54","date_gmt":"2022-07-19T08:54:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/claes-oldenburg-obituary-sculpture\/"},"modified":"2022-07-19T08:54:54","modified_gmt":"2022-07-19T08:54:54","slug":"claes-oldenburg-obituary-sculpture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/claes-oldenburg-obituary-sculpture\/","title":{"rendered":"Claes Oldenburg obituary | Sculpture"},"content":{"rendered":"
Had the ideas of Claes Oldenburg been realized, Piccadilly Circus would have had as its hub not a 19th-century sculpture of Eros but a cluster of 8m-high orange lipsticks or a skyscraper-sized pair of women’s knees. Both projects were imagined for the site by the Swedish-American artist and sculptor, who has died at the age of 93.<\/p>\n
In London in 1966, Oldenburg found himself captivated by what he called the \u201cparadoxical combination of masculine voyeurism and feminine liberation\u201d bound up in Mary Quant and the miniskirt. Neither London Knees nor Lipsticks made it past maquette stage \u2013 the postcard collage Lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus, London (1966) is now in the Tate collection \u2013 but if the works had been created, they would have raised the same questions about civic art that Oldenburg’s sculptures were to pose everywhere from Minneapolis to M\u00fcnster. <\/p>\n
In the event, a variant of the second piece was to appear not in London but in New Haven, Connecticut, outside a library at Yale University, Oldenburg’s own alma mater. Lipstick (Ascending) on \u200b\u200bCaterpillar Tracks (1969) was made as a satire on America’s involvement in the Vietnam war, and rolled surreptitiously into place by students under cover of night. \u201cI am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something more than sit on its ass in a museum,\u201d Oldenburg said. Although acute enough to sense trouble in the work’s merging of feminine reference and phallic shape, university authorities wisely left Lipstick (Ascending) alone. It was eventually moved to another Yale site, where it still stands.<\/p>\n