LOS ANGELES — Coosje van Bruggen, an art historian, writer and curator whose partnership with her husband, artist Claes Oldenburg, turned ordinary objects into startling monuments — including the “Big Sweep” dustpan and broom sculpture outside the Denver Art Museum — died Saturday of breast cancer at 66.
Van Bruggen was the author of scholarly essays on the work of major contemporary artists. She also wrote a monograph on architect Frank O. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. But she is best known for collaborations with Oldenburg, which have placed giant trowels, shuttlecocks, bowling pins and typewriter erasers on parklands, civic squares and museum grounds in Europe, Asia and the U.S.
Born and educated in Groningen, Netherlands, 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 encounter 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 Swedish-born American sculptor and his scholarly Dutch associate might have appeared to be an unlikely match. But their relationship grew into what Oldenburg called “a unity of opposites,” and they were married in 1977.
Van Bruggen, who became a U.S. citizen in 1993, continued to work independently throughout her career.
Her husband survives her.
