Claes Oldenburg, influential Pop artist who made massive sculptures of everyday objects, dies
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
