Claes Oldenburg took familiar everyday objects and transformed them into monumental works of art. There was a giant, red-handled saw rasping its way through a futuristic office development in Tokyo; a collection of bright yellow and red-tipped 22ft matches in Barcelona; and a 45ft steel clothes peg in central Philadelphia. Elsewhere he created a 30ft aluminium spoon with a large red cherry for downtown Minneapolis and an oversized Swiss army knife that floated temporarily in the shipyards of the Venice Arsenal.
“I am for art that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum,” he declared, describing traditional civic statuary as just a bunch of “bulls and Greeks and nekkid broads”. Yet by the end of the 20th century much of his