By the time the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, tapped Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen for a massive sculpture garden commission in the 1990s, the schtick that the two artists had established in other cities was already well known.
In Minneapolis, a spoon as long as two London buses balancing a 1,200-pound maraschino cherry at its end had been a fixture for a few years. The 45-foot tall clothespin that the artists erected across the street from City Hall in Philadelphia, taller than a telephone pole and made from Cor-Ten and stainless steel, was now a weather-worn downtown icon that had been around for nearly two decades. The artists’ first oversized novelty monument — a rose-blush lipstick tube, tall as a giraffe, mounted on a base with caterpillar tank treads — had tickled students at Yale University for 25 years.
