The famous Clothespin sculpture in Center City was created by Claes Oldenburg, who passed away on Monday. He was 93.
In real life, Oldenburg was renowned for transforming common objects into massive works of art that are now displayed all over the world.
His Batcolumn, a steel baseball bat with latticework, stands outside a federal office building in Chicago at a height of 100 feet, and the 45-foot Clothespin has been visible from City Hall in Philadelphia since 1976.
The Kiss, a sculpture of a man and woman kissing with their faces in contact, created by Constantin Brancusi in 1908, was intended to be similar to The Clothespin.
Oldenburg was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1929, but spent most of his childhood in Chicago because his father was the general consul of Sweden there.
Before relocating to New York in the late 1950s, he studied at Yale and the Art Institute of Chicago.
A few years later, the Happening, a style of performance art that the New York Times once described as “a far-out amusement more complicated than the twist, more psychological than a séance, and twice as aggravating as a game of charades,” brought attention to his work.