Quite a few times in the past few weeks, the twelve meter high pickaxe created by Claes Oldenburg for Documenta 7 in 1982 has had to serve as a vile illustration on the banks of the Fulda river.

The picture message was clear every time: the ax should finally be thrown into the protracted scandal surrounding the Kassel World Art Show in order to put an end to the spook.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The son of a high-ranking Swedish diplomat, born Claes Thure in Stockholm in 1929, was himself an ambassador of a soft and forgiving art.

Trained in art history at Yale and artistically at the Art Institute of Chicago, who became the epitome of Pop Art with his monumental and soft-looking sculptures in the inner city districts of many large cities around the world, he wanted an art that did not want to intimidate through abstract foreignness, rather seeks mediating communication with its viewers through the conspicuous enlargement of everyday and familiar objects.

The fact that Oldenburg's sculptures, which used to be marble-white or gilded bronze, were mostly painted brightly colored, increased the apparently carefree accessibility of his art, although with the side effect that

In doing so, Oldenburg dealt intensively with the respective genius loci of the installation sites.

In the case of the “pickaxe”, which is still one of the most popular photo motifs in the city of Kassel, it was the artist’s Grimm fairy tale, so to speak, that Hercules in Kassel himself hurled this symbol of post-war reconstruction from the mountain to the spot on the banks of the Fulda.

In Germany, Oldenburg has an above-average number of immortalizations.

In Freiburg im Breisgau, for example, the meter-long red giant snake in his "Garden hose with water tap" from 1983 shines at you from afar, which, with its calligraphy in trendy bright red, also achieves the feat of giving a softly curved sculpture something graphic.

Frankfurt is blessed with the typical local sculpture “Inverted Collar and Tie” in front of an office tower, developed together with his companion Coosje van Bruggen, who died in 2009, and since October 2021 with another special feature in a more modest format: thanks to the generous donation of the philanthropic founder Ulrike Crespo , photographer and co-heiress to the Wella fortune,

Oldenburg's painted calculating machine "Burroughs Adder" came into the possession of the Frankfurt Städel Museum: Instead of calculating as hard as iron, the cocoa brown watercolored calculating device melts like a heap of chocolate in the sun.

Its effeminate form suggests that it calculates rather soft prices, very different from those that his gigantic works have fetched since the 1960s.

The skyscrapers pulled up his sculptures

Because since 1965, the monumentalizing blow-up effect of his French fries and hamburgers, his curved giant screws and tools, has followed the walk into the outer space of the sky-storming skyscrapers of New York, basically the logical consequence of the gigantic backdrop of "his" city in front of which every "only" life-size plastic would simply be overlooked - the American lifestyle was not just "larger than life" after Trump.

Ultimately, Oldenburg translates Salvadore Dalí's soft-boiled beans and clocks into the three-dimensional, gigantic, which thereby acquire something uncanny, because the viewer expects something solid and hard at the same time in an oversized object through the naturalistic deceptive effect.

This is one of the reasons why in German,

Today, Monday, this tender softener of the sculpture died at the age of 93 in his beloved city of New York.

Presumably he will also be able to transform the huge deposits of cloud marble in the sky into "soft sculptures" of all kinds.