As a Swedish immigrant child in Chicago, Claes Oldenburg dreamed up an imaginary world in intricately detailed drawings. As a founding father of Pop art, he focused on real objects of the most ordinary kind — vacuum cleaners, lipstick tubes, sun hats, typewriter erasers — and re-envisioned them as massive sculptures.
“I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself,” he wrote in 1961 in a stream-of-consciousness manifesto. “I am for an artist who vanishes, turning up in a white cap painting signs or hallways.”
A major figure in 20th century art history, Oldenburg died Monday at 93 at his home and studio in New York, said Adriana Elgarresta, a spokeswoman for the Pace gallery in New York, which represented him. He was recovering from a fall, she said.
