Claes Oldenburg sculpture installed at Philadelphia Museum of Art

It dangled high in the air, a connector seeking a connection, before slowly being lowered into the waiting earth.

At 11:45 Wednesday morning, the Philadelphia Museum of Art was at last plugged in.

After hours of maneuvering and digging and pondering, the museum installed the latest addition to its outdoor sculpture garden, a gift from the collector and philanthropist David Pincus - Claes Oldenburg's Giant Three-Way Plug, Scale A, a nearly 10-foot-long electric plug, a cube tap grown to monstrous proportions, now protruding from a grassy knob outside the museum's west entrance.

Dating from 1970, the plug is the second colossal outdoor sculpture fashioned by Oldenburg using everyday objects as inspiration. The first was Lipstick, installed at Yale University in 1969.

Pincus, 83, who watched Wednesday's installation for hours, acquired one of the three big plugs (the two others are at the St. Louis Art Museum and the Allen Art Museum of Oberlin College in Ohio) early in the 1970s and, with the artist's assistance, installed it in his Wynnewood backyard.

He recalled Oldenburg's coming down from New York to help install the piece many years ago.

"We had a wonderful time," Pincus said. "We were digging in the backyard. Even Oldenburg. He loved fresh fruit, and my wife went out to get him some. He did some drawings in a little book."

Now Pincus has given the piece to the Art Museum in honor of Anne d'Harnoncourt, its late director, who died in 2008. The sculpture garden, which began with a sheaf of works by Isamu Noguchi, will be named in d'Harnoncourt's honor at a ceremony at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 7. Mayor Nutter is scheduled to be on hand to announce the renaming of Museum Drive as Anne d'Harnoncourt Drive.

"I'm sure Anne would be delighted with what they've done with the garden," said Pincus. "She was something special."

Will he miss seeing the plug as he strolls behind his home?

"My kids will," Pincus said as he watched the crew of workers from Atelier Art Services, the Philadelphia firm that stored and moved the piece.

" 'Dad, don't do that!' " Pincus said his grown children urged him. "But art is for enjoyment. You have it in a lifetime. It doesn't belong to you."

Oldenburg, who could not make it down from New York for the Wednesday dig and drop, said the concept for the plug, made of Cor-Ten steel and bronze, was architectural.

"The plug looks very much like a building," he said, describing the form. It is actually set into the earth, like a building rising from a subterranean foundation.

"There was also the idea that this might have fallen from outer space," he said. "It has no base, no platform." In fact, he said, it appears to have "fallen and created its own hole in the ground."

With the addition of the plug to the Art Museum's sculpture garden, there will be three high-visibility outdoor Oldenburgs in Philadelphia. A fourth is coming next year, a 50-foot-plus paint brush rising from a plaza - yet to be constructed - next to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, across North Broad Street from the new Convention Center extension.

Philadelphia is the center of public work by Oldenburg, known for creating mammoth renderings of everyday objects. The first two works installed in the city were Clothespin, installed at the Centre Square office development, 15th and Market Streets, in 1976, followed in 1981 by the University of Pennsylvania's Split Button.

Both Clothespin and Split Button owe their presence here to the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority's requirement that developers devote up to 1 percent of construction costs on RDA land to art.

"No city has four," said Oldenburg, attributing the city's abundance of his work to its percent-for-art programs. (The RDA and the city each established such programs in 1959.)

Following the installation of Clothespin, Oldenburg worked in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, now deceased. Split Button was their first large work together.

"It developed from an idea of hers, a button she found on campus, a broken button she picked up, the most inconsequential thing," he recalled.

They developed that find into a 16-foot-wide sculpture. Now Oldenburg, 81, is working on a design for a split-button lapel pin - a monumental sculpture reduced to the size of a button.

Timothy Rub, president and chief executive of the Art Museum, said the sculpture garden's plug is actually the museum's second Three-Way Plug by Oldenburg. There is also a smaller, delicate version.

"It's a three-way plug done in, I think, cherry wood," said Rub. "It's the indoor version. We can cover all conditions now with indoor and outdoor plugs. . . . I think Oldenburg is one of the great makers of public sculpture of his generation. His approach has been truly distinctive."

(Oldenburg distinguished the two pieces as "one light and floating, one heavy and fallen, each asserting what they're made of.")

For Carlos Basualdo, the museum's contemporary art curator and curator for the sculpture garden, the Oldenburg marks perhaps a transformative moment in the evolution of the outdoor space.

"It has the potential for becoming a signature piece," he said. "The Oldenburg plug stands out - the materials, the image. I think the whole thing works very well together."

As Ray Huxen and his wife, Diane, were leaving the museum Wednesday morning, they stopped to watch the workers swarming around the plug.

"I love it," said Huxen. He and his wife live in New Orleans and are visiting their son here. "I just love it."

"What is it?" said Diane Huxen, watching the maneuvering around the two-ton piece.

"It's a production putting it up, I'll tell you that," she said. "Kind of dangerous."

Ray Huxen said, "It's the kind of thing we ought to have in New Orleans. I'm pleased that Philadelphia has such beautiful things."

Looking at the plug, now jutting from the top of the museum's grassy knoll, Pincus said he was pleased with the result as well.

"It speaks," he said.