CHICAGO — Not everyone liked the things that artist Claes Oldenburg made, which were gigantic sculptures of such commonplace items as a hamburger, a lipstick case, clothespin, ice cream cone, pretzel, ironing board, teddy bear, aspirin, and a very, very big bat in Chicago.
Before the bat was built, the late Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp referred to the artist as “a veteran put-on man and poseur,” railing that he was “about to rip off taxpayers for a $100,000 baseball bat.” After it was built in 1977, my former colleague, Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Blair Kamin, called it “ludicrous.”
But The New York Times looked on Oldenburg favorably. He died on July 18 in the Manhattan home/studio where he had long resided and part of the headline of his obituary in that newspaper noted that he “took humble objects to new heights” and a later story shouted that “Claes Oldenburg Was a Big Deal.”
