“MANHATTAN — American sculptor and pioneer of large-scale, contorted, AbEx automobile art, John Chamberlain, was pronounced dead at 84 on Wednesday night. His wife, Prudence Fairweather, declined to give a cause of death. Though Chamberlain died in Manhattan, he mostly spent his final years in and around his home on Shelter Island, NY.
Born in Rochester, Ind., the son of a tavern keeper but raised mostly by his grandmother after his parents divorced, Mr. Chamberlain made his first sculptural works out of welded iron, in thrall to the Abstract Expressionist sculptor David Smith. But in the late 1950s he discovered that automotive detritus was both plentiful and already covered in wonderfully weathered paint that looked as if Willem de Kooning himself had put it there.
Chamberlain’s subsequent half-century career spanned a vast array of materials, from foam rubber to brown paper bags. He returned again and again, however, to the more substantial stuff of the scrap yard, explaining the attraction as one of practicality. ‘I saw all this material just lying around against buildings, and it was in color,’ he said, ‘so I felt I was ahead on two counts.’
Critics often saw his crumpled Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles as dark commentaries on the costs of American freedom, but Mr. Chamberlain rejected such metaphorical readings. He turned to making sculpture from other things partly because he grew so tired of the automotive associations. ‘It seems no one can get free of the car-crash syndrome,’ he told curator Julie Sylvester in 1986. ‘For 25 years I’ve been using colored metal to make sculpture, and all they can think of is, ‘What the hell car did that come from?’’
Mr. Chamberlain felt that even the word ‘sculpture’ was limiting in describing art that, while functioning in three dimensions, could be made from almost anything. ‘A sculpture is something that if it falls on your foot, it will break it,’ he said.”
(Via Art & Education » News.)