“I thought its iconography [was] too much like a cake shovel and not enough like a tool,” van

“Spoonbridge and Cherry,” 1988, stainless steel and aluminum painted with polyurethane enamel, in Minneapolis.

Bruggen explains. Her sensitive and witty placement furthered this clarification. “It’s at the transition of the manicured garden into the wilder part, and you can see it from both,” she explains. “It looks very beautiful there.”

“The whole idea of placing a piece in relation to its setting is Coosje’s idea more than mine,” continues Oldenburg, who early on established a practice of transforming ordinary objects like a piece of cake or a baseball bat into a work of art by altering its size, density and material. “The sculptures that were done before our partnership could have been realized in any of several situations, because it was a sculpture in itself. Now the large-scale projects grow out of observations of a particular place.” The pair have created “Cupid’s Span” in San Francisco, a bow and arrow piercing the city where Tony Bennett left his heart; “Ago, Filo e Nodo (Needle, Thread and Knot)” in Milan, the fashion mecca; and they are working on “Collar and Bow,” a sprung-open shirt collar with black bow tie, to be situated outside the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.

As invitations to create these site-specific works continued to come from all over the world, the artists became more and more fluid with their partnership. “We did not set out to work together,” recalls van Bruggen, who married Oldenburg in 1977, “but because we were living together, Claes would ask me things and I would answer. It turned out that I often saw the same subject from a different point of view. It grew more and more rich because always, where one had a blind spot, the other would fill it in.”

While working on “Flashlight” in 1981 for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, they realized the extent to which their collaboration had grown—the final work was neither his nor hers, but rather a product of the exchange of ideas that flowed back and forth as they discussed color, form, shape and orientation. “I said, ‘Okay, now we go on or we don’t go on and I will never say a word again,’” van Bruggen recalls. “That was the point that we began to work together.” It was also the first sculpture that bore both of the artists’ signatures.