LOS ANGELES – Coosje van Bruggen, a critic, art historian and sculptor who collaborated with her artist-husband Claes Oldenburg on his giant sculptures of mundane objects, has died. She was 66.
Van Bruggen died Saturday in her Los Angeles home after fighting breast cancer, said Andrea Glimcher, a spokeswoman for PaceWildenstein, which represented van Bruggen.
Van Bruggen gained a reputation as an inquisitive critic with her scholarly books and essays on the works of John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter and other contemporary artists.
She was best known through her work with the Swedish-born, American pop artist Oldenburg.
Their collaborations included a 38-foot-tall replica of an upended flashlight on the campus of the University of Las Vegas and a mammoth bicycle that appears to be half-buried at Parc de la Villette in Paris.
"She provided a formidable balance to what Claes brought creatively," said Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. "He was playful. He's a draftsman; he begins with a sensual line. She looked at things with a much more conceptual and systematic approach."
Van Bruggen was born in Groningen, the Netherlands, on June 6, 1942. She 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 41-foot "Trowel I" on the grounds of the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, the Netherlands. The pair married a year later.
She was credited with using a matter-of-fact-approach to persuade mayors and other city officials to embrace the sometimes controversial public artworks she and her husband sought to install.
"I'm the daughter of a physician," she said in a 2006 interview, "and I always feel that every piece is a diagnosis."
Besides her husband, van Bruggen is survived by her two children from a previous marriage, two grandchildren, two brothers and a sister.
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