Obituary: John Chamberlain / Sculptor worked with automobile sheet metal
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Sculptor John Chamberlain in his Shelter Island, N.Y., studio in May 2011.
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John Chamberlain, a prolific American sculptor whose use of crushed automobile sheet-metal became his signature during a career that spanned half a century, died Dec. 21 in New York City. He was 84.
He had been working on a retrospective exhibition scheduled to open Feb. 24 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, his second at the Manhattan institution. The artist's death was announced by his wife, Prudence Fairweather, although no cause was given.
The artist claimed that his knowledge of art history was scant, but he often made sculptures that acknowledged ancient precedent in up-to-date materials. The welded metal "totems" David Smith made in the 1950s from old boilers, shop tools and other industrial scrap were the most important immediate antecedent to his work, as were the muscular abstract paintings of his friend Franz Kline. The linear space and vivid Expressionist palette of Willem de Kooning also had a profound impact. Yet, piecing together junkyard scraps of twisted automobiles, Mr. Chamberlain could create imposing abstract monoliths that displayed the dramatic sweep of Hellenistic Greek carvings or the coiled energy of Italian Baroque tableaux.
Mr. Chamberlain's earliest sculptures were made from welded iron rods. His first sculpture using car parts was 1957's "Short Stop," made from the rusty fenders of a 1929 Ford that he found in the Long Island yard of his friend, painter Larry Rivers. With the incorporation of car parts, the linear nature of his earlier sculptures began to assume rounded volume. By 1961, his mature sculptural style was fully formed, the shallow space of "Short Stop" now voluminous.
Color, which hadn't been a major factor in 20th-century sculpture, was also important. It was given by the choice of found materials. Color was also added or subtracted by a studio assistant wielding a spray gun or an industrial sander, or else it was embellished by Mr. Chamberlain using cans of spray paint in graffiti-like drawing.
First Published January 11, 2012 12:00 am
