Claes Oldenburg, who designed ‘Clothespin,’ has died

Claes Oldenburg, the artist who designed the iconic Clothespin sculpture in Center City, died Monday. He was 93.

In life, Oldenburg was known for turning everyday items into large-scale works of art, which can be seen around the world. In Chicago, his Batcolumn — a steel, latticework baseball bat — towers 100 feet high outside a federal office building, and the 45-foot Clothespin has stood across from Philadelphia’s City Hall since 1976.

The Clothespin was supposed to resemble Constantin Brancusi’s 1908 The Kiss, a sculpture of a man and woman embracing with faces touching.

The metal spring in the Clothespin is meant to look like the number 76, according to the New York Times, which was fitting since the giant sculpture was installed around the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Oldenburg left his mark on Philadelphia with three other sculptures: the Split Button on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus, The Plug at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Paint Torch at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

“It’s always a matter of interpretation, but I tend to look at all my works as being completely pure,” Oldenburg told the Chicago Tribune in 1977. “That’s the adventure of it: to take an object that’s highly impure and see it as pure. That’s the fun.”

Oldenburg was born in 1929 in Stockholm, Sweden, but grew up mostly in Chicago, where his father was Swedish consul general.

He attended Yale and the Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York in the late 1950s.

His work began to gain attention several years later through a type of performance art called the Happening — which the New York Times once said was “a far-out entertainment more sophisticated than the twist, more psychological than a séance and twice as exasperating as a game of charades.”

Around the same time, people began to notice his sculptures, especially the “soft sculptures,” a genre which he helped develop. In this style, Oldenburg depicted mundane items like telephones and electric mixers in vinyl.

One of his most well-known early steel structures was Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, which showed a giant lipstick tube on a tank and was installed at Yale in 1969.

Oldenburg was married, first to Pat in the 1960s and then to Coosje van Bruggen in 1977. Both were fellow artists, and Van Bruggen collaborated with Oldenburg on some of his later work, including Trowel I, which is displayed at the Kroller-Muller Museum in the Netherlands. Van Bruggen died in 2009.

Oldenburg died in Manhattan Monday morning after breaking his hip in a fall last month.

The Associated Press contributed to this article.