Claes Oldenburg Dies at 93; Pop Artist Made the Everyday Monumental

Claes Oldenburg, the Swedish-born American Pop artist known for his monumental sculptures of everyday objects, died on Monday at his home and studio in the Soho section of Manhattan. He was 93.

His death was confirmed by Adriana Elgarresta, a spokeswoman for the Pace gallery in New York, which, along with the Paula Cooper Gallery, has long represented him.

Mr. Oldenburg entered the New York art scene in earnest in the late 1950s, embracing the audience-participation “Happenings” then in vogue and expanding the boundaries of art with shows that incorporated things like street signs, wire-and-plaster clothing and even pieces of pie. His approach to everyday objects, performance and collaboration has continued to influence generations of artists.

An early project, “The Store” (1961), opened in a storefront in the East Village and sold absurd plaster facsimiles of everyday objects — like a shoe or a cheeseburger out of a comic strip, only covered with the recognizable drips and improvisational dashes of Abstract Expressionism.

As he focused more and more on sculpture, he began increasing the scale of his work, taking as his starting point ordinary objects like hamburgers, ice cream cones and household appliances and then enlarging them to unfamiliar, often imposing dimensions.

One of his most famous installations, erected in 1976 — the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence — is “Clothespin,” a 45-foot-high, 10-ton black steel sculpture of precisely what the title indicates, complete with a metal spring that appropriately evokes the number 76. The work stands in stark contrast to conventional public sculpture, which Mr. Oldenburg, impersonating a municipal official, said was supposed to involve “bulls and Greeks and lots of nekkid broads.”

Mr. Oldenburg was heavily influenced by the French artist Jean Dubuffet, who brought so-called Outsider art into galleries and museums, upsetting the status quo of institutional art. But like many Pop artists, Mr. Oldenburg also took cues from Marcel Duchamp, whose so-called readymade sculptures from the early 20th century were actually ordinary, mass-produced objects (a bicycle wheel, a urinal). Mr. Oldenburg’s sculptures, however, were handcrafted rather than store-bought, and he wanted them to be, as he put it, “just as mysterious as nature.”

“My intention is to make an everyday object that eludes definition,” he once said. He rarely depicted people; instead he focused on items closely associated with human needs and desires. “I’ve expressed myself consistently in objects with reference to human beings rather than through human beings,” he said. As the art dealer Arne Glimcher, who knew and worked with Mr. Oldenburg since the early 1960s put it in an interview on Monday, “His work was almost psychoanalytic.”

Mr. Glimcher noted that precise drawings served as the basis for Mr. Oldenburg’s work. “He was a draughtsman comparable to Ingres or Picasso,” he said, but “with the daring to mess it up.”

His most important contribution to sculpture, Mr. Glimcher said, was turning it from something hard, like bronze or wood, to something soft. The sculptures would deflate, and Mr. Glimcher recalled Mr. Oldenburg instructing his associates to “fluff them up.”

Paula Cooper, the New York art dealer who co-represented Mr. Oldenburg for many years, said of his everyday sculptures: “They were funky but always formally strong, and over time the work became grander. He would take a simple idea and expand it.”

Claes Thure Oldenburg was born in Stockholm on Jan. 28, 1929, the son of Gosta and Sigrid Elisabeth (Lindforss) Oldenburg. His father, a diplomat, had postings in London, Berlin, Oslo and New York before being appointed in 1936 as the Swedish consul general in Chicago, where Claes grew up and attended the Latin School of Chicago.

Mr. Oldenburg studied literature and art history at Yale University from 1946 to 1950. He returned to the Midwest to study at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1950s with the painter Paul Wieghardt, a student of Paul Klee’s at the modernist Bauhaus school in Weimar, Germany. During his early years in art school, Mr. Oldenburg worked for the City News Bureau of Chicago, where one of his duties included drawing comic strips. He was the only major artist associated with Pop Art to have drawn comics professionally.

Mr. Oldenburg became a United States citizen in 1953 and moved to New York in 1956. His first exhibition, at the Judson Gallery in May 1959, included drawings, collages and objects made of papier-mâché.

His first significant shows in New York were The Street (1960), which consisted of cars, street signs and human figures made of cardboard and burlap, and The Store (1961), for which he opened his studio, then occupying a storefront on the Lower East Side, to visitors, bringing art and commerce together in the artist’s atelier. Objects for sale included sandwiches, pieces of…