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His achievement has been to take an extraordinary range of banal objects, invest them with consistent metaphoric power, and turn them into near-epic images of love and death. Baudelaire once remarked of talent that it "is nothing more nor less than childhood rediscovered at will — a childhood now equipped for self-expression, with man hood's capacities and a power of anal ysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated." So with Oldenburg, whose art, for all its complexity, signals a way back to the unrepressed appetites of childhood. "Everything I do is completely original," Oldenburg wrote in 1966. "I made it up when I was a little kid."
· Robert Hughes