Photo: Bob Carey/Los Angeles Times
Coosje van Bruggen, an art historian, writer, and curator whose professional partnership with her husband, artist Claes Oldenburg, turned ordinary objects into startling monuments around the world, died of breast cancer Saturday January 10 at her Los Angeles residence, the Los Angeles Times’s Suzanne Muchnic reports. She was sixty-six.
Van Bruggen was the author of scholarly books and essays on the work of major contemporary artists including John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, and Gerhard Richter. She also wrote a monograph on Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. But she is perhaps best known for collaborations with Oldenburg. Cologne has its upside-down ice-cream cone; San Francisco, its bow and arrow; Denver, its dustpan and broom.
Born in Groningen, the Netherlands, on June 6, 1942, and educated there, van Bruggen got her professional start as a curator at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Enschede. Her first work with Oldenburg came in 1976, when she helped him install his forty-one-foot Trowel I on the grounds of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. Van Bruggen, who became a US citizen in 1993, continued to work independently throughout her career. She helped select artists for Documenta 7, the 1982 edition of the prestigious international contemporary art exhibition; contributed articles to Artforum from 1983 to 1988; and served as senior critic in the sculpture department at Yale University School of Art in 1996–97.
Artforum
