IN Kansas, there are supersized shuttlecocks scattered on a lawn. In Venice Beach, California, there’s a four storey pair of binoculars acting as the entrance to an office block. In Minneapolis, there’s a bridge made out of a spoon with a giant red cherry sitting on its rim. In Barcelona, there’s a 68ft tall red and yellow box of matches. In Milan, there’s a huge needle and thread in the middle of a fountain. In Baden-Wurttemberg, there’s a massive tangle of garden hose in a park. In Cologne, there’s a giant upside down ice cream cone that has been dropped on the top of a shopping centre.

It's directly above Primark.

The Northern Echo:

And in Middlesbrough, outside the law courts, there’s a 35ft bottle, bobbing out of the dry land at a wonky angle with a load of indecipherable letters wrapped around it.

All are the works of Claes Oldenburg, the Swedish-American sculptor who died on Monday in Manhattan at the age of 93.

And most, if not all, were controversial when they were proposed.

In Middlesbrough in 1993, the £130,000 Bottle of Notes was condemned as a waste of money by Langbaurgh MP Richard Holt, and the Conservative group leader, Cllr Hazel Pearson, took one look at it and said: "I see no work of art there. It's worse than my nightmares about it. It's disgraceful. It sticks out like a sore thumb and denigrates the excellent architecture on the Boulevard. I'd say it's a blot on the landscape.”

The Northern Echo: Claes Oldenburg and his wife Coosje van Bruggen at the unveiling of their sculpture, Bottle of Notes, in Middlesbrough on September 24, 1993

Claes Oldenburg and his wife Coosje van Bruggen at the unveiling of their sculpture, Bottle of Notes, in Middlesbrough on September 24, 1993

However, the Bottle of Notes was a trailblazer for outsize public art, with everything from Gateshead’s Angel of the North to Darlington’s Brick Train following in its wake.

And is it that bad? In 2005, The Northern Echo said of the Bottle: “Derided at the time but, more than a decade later, it ranks alongside the Transporter Bridge and smog as the enduring symbol of Middlesbrough.”

Oldenburg was born in Stockholm but because his father, a diplomat, was posted to America, he grew up in New York. In the 1960s, he became a leader of the Pop Art movement with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, making sculptures of familiar subjects like cheeseburgers and penknives out of unexpected materials, like vinyl or foam, and then placing them in odd locations.

He believed that art should be out among the people and not “sat on its ass in a museum”.

During the 1970s and 1980s, particularly after marrying his second wife Coosje van Bruggen, his art became larger and more public.

The Northern Echo: Claes Oldenburg at the waste ground outside Middlesbrough town hall in 1988 where his Bottle of Notes sculpture was going to go

Claes Oldenburg at the waste ground outside Middlesbrough town hall in 1988 where his Bottle of Notes sculpture was going to go

In the late 1980s, Middlesbrough council and Northern Arts thought they had pulled off a coup by persuading this internationally-renowned artist to work on the wasteland they were regenerating near Middlesbrough Town Hall. It was even more of a coup because art funds, trusts and individuals contributed all but £5,000 of the cost.

Unusually for Oldenburg, the work was rooted in the place where it was going to rest. The bottle represented a message home from Middlesbrough’s most famous son, Captain James Cook, and it is at a wonky angle, like the Tower of Pisa, because it is bobbing in the sea.

The letters on the outside are from Cook’s journal of 1769 when he was in Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun: "We had every advantage we could desire in observing the whole of the passage of the planet Venus over the Sun's disc."

Inscribed on the inside is a line from one of Oldenburg’s Dutch wife’s poems about her childhood in Amsterdam: "I like to remember seagulls in full flight gliding over the ring of canals."

The Northern Echo: The Bottle of Notes sculpture takes shape at Hawthorn Leslie Engineering, of Hebburn

The Bottle of Notes sculpture takes shape at Hawthorn Leslie Engineering, of Hebburn

The Bottle of Notes was unveiled on September 24, 1993. It is 12ft in diameter, weighs eight tons and was made of steel by Hawthorn Leslie Engineering, of Hebburn.

Because it is about Middlesbrough’s maritime past, it is painted blue and white to represent the sea and the sky, but when the red-and-white Boro under Bryan Robson reached the Football League Cup Final 1998 against blue-and-white Chelsea, there was a campaign to get it to change colours. Oldenburg refused to allow it.

The Northern Echo: Claes Oldenburg and his wife Coosje van Bruggen at the unveiling of their sculpture, Bottle of Notes, in Middlesbrough on September 24, 1993

In the week of his death, he has been hailed as the “pop artist who monumentalised the everyday” and as the man who “revolutionized our idea what a public monument could be”. It doesn’t have to be a dead Victorian man on a plinth.

Instead his sculptures were absurd, colourful, fanciful and often thought-provoking – he famously built a lifesize tank but put a woman’s bright lipstick where the gun turret should have been.

Middlesbrough has probably now made peace with its own Oldenburg which has become a Tees Valley landmark.