Claes Oldenburg

Claes Oldenburg

• School Yale University
• High School Latin School of Chicago

• Born January 28, 1929 in Stockholm Sweden
• Died July 18, 2022 in New York, NY USA

Biographical Information

Claes Oldenburg is an American artist of Swedish background who is best known for his large public sculptures. A follower of the Pop Art artistic school founded by Andy Warhol, his work consists largely of depictions of everyday objects blown up to gigantic size, such as an apple core, a garden hose, or bowling pins.

The son of a Swedish diplomat, he grew up in Chicago, IL, where his father was stationed as consul general, and went to high school there before going on to Yale University and taking art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. He then became an American citizen and settled in New York, NY. He first created what he called "soft sculptures" in reaction to the school of abstract expressionism which dominated the U.S. art scene at the time, then turned to the style that made him famous. He was commissioned to create works of public art all over the U.S. and also in Europe. That was even though public reaction to his work was often mixed, with many finding it overly simple and outside of traditional conceptions of art, but they gained acceptance with time and many had become iconic by the time he died in 2022.

Oldenburg's main connection to baseball comes through one of his most famous sculptures, entitled Batcolumn. It is a 101-foot tall depiction of a baseball bat standing on its knob, erected in Chicago in 1977 outside the Harold Washington Social Security Administration Building. It is made of steel latticework and painted gray. Like much of his work, the sculpture was highly controversial and often derided at first, but has now become an icon of the city, alongside Flamingo by Alexander Calder (which was unveiled only a couple of years earlier) and Cloud Gate, designed by Anish Kapoor, in Millennium Park.