Had the ideas of Claes Oldenburg been realised, 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.
In London in 1966, Oldenburg found himself captivated by what he called the “paradoxical combination of masculine voyeurism and feminine liberation” bound up in Mary Quant and the miniskirt. Neither London Knees nor Lipsticks made it past maquette stage – the postcard collage Lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus, London (1966) is now in the Tate collection – 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 Münster.
