John Chamberlain

Photo by Andrew Moore

The artist inside "The Forest" (1993–2008)

Richard Serra Willem de Kooning Franz Kline David Smith Larry Rivers Cai Guo Qiang Vincent van Gogh van Gogh

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Their working names are “severed heads,” “baby tycoons,” “wheels,” “waterfalls,” “campfires” and “haystacks,” and they are the tiny to towering metal sculptures that cram John Chamberlain’s immense, airy studio in Shelter Island, New York. The room, attached to the main house by walkways, glistens and shimmers with steel and chrome spires, spikes, spirals, coils and wiggly ribbons that look alive and ready to party.

If the name John Chamberlain doesn’t immediately resonate, think crushed cars. For better or worse, his sculptures from the late 1950s and early ’60s, made from bent and twisted automobile bodies, have become his signature pieces, although over the years he has also used brown paper bags, foam rubber, wood, iron, Mylar, colored glass, mirrors, Plexiglas, tin, aluminum foil and paper and cloth towels. “I believe that common materials are the best materials,” he likes to say.

Chamberlain has also made three feature films and many oil paintings and ink drawings. Even more numerous are his photographs, dating from the ’60s on. These have been widely exhibited and pored over by critics and scholars, who find ready parallels between the jazzy panoramic sweep and blur of some shots (he doesn’t look through the viewfinder) and the mood and color of his sculptures. Chamberlain dismisses much of what has been written about him, yet he graciously assents to one more interview.

“I’m basically a collagist,” he says, sitting in his labyrinthine studio-house, where cool jazz plays in rooms filled with sculpture and photographs. “I put one thing together with another thing. I sort of invented my own art supplies. I saw all this material just lying around against buildings and it was in color, so I felt I was ahead on two counts there.”

The use of discarded metal forged and painted in Detroit was a major innovation. With it Chamberlain broke a centuries-long tradition in which sculpture was cast or carved and usually monochromatic. Arne Glimcher, chairman of PaceWildenstein, which has shown Chamberlain in New York for some 20 years, calls him the “great revolutionary sculptor in the 20th century, even more radical than Richard Serra.” Serra, who is of the generation after Chamberlain, says: “John was able to rise above the romanticism and mythology of Abstract Expressionism. He gave other artists permission to do things they wouldn’t have done without his breakthrough.”

Chamberlain’s first car piece, Short-stop, 1957, was made from the fenders of a 1929 Ford rusting in Larry Rivers’s Long Island yard. When the fenders wouldn’t bend readily, Chamberlain ran over them with a truck. By 1980, after exhibitions at Leo Castelli Gallery, the Guggenheim and other venues, he was successful enough to move to Sarasota, Florida, where he had an industrial-style operation with eight assistants and two car crushers among many other machines, plus a shed in a junkyard. The Shelter Island establishment is far more modest, with only one compactor and one part-time assistant.

At 81, Chamberlain is a friendly bear with bad knees and back pain. Plainspoken, with a Midwestern twang, he is an accomplished raconteur who offers historical recollections alongside bawdy stories and puns. Indeed, his titles are full of puns—Now Morton Ever, Anything Goethe, Alsatia Will, C’est What, Midas Well—and Dadaesque riffs that he collects from friends and colleagues and keeps in a list some 1,200 entries long and on one-word cards. From these he chooses a title by cobbling together words because “I like the way they look next to each other.” In this way also he is a collagist. While his titles rarely describe his pieces, which are abstract in any case, they often define their spirit—like Ornaments of Melody.

Chamberlain still works largely the way he always has—by addition and intuition, using no armatures, seeking harmony in fragments. “I don’t have any preconceived idea of what I’m going to do when I go into the studio,” he says. “Whatever pops up is as good as anything else. If I plan—I’ll do this and this—it never happens.” Presorted, prepainted and precrinkled metal is piled neatly in a yard outside his studio. Still doing all the assembling himself (the material isn’t heavy; it gains the look of heft and volume by accumulation and bending), he selects parts that he feels have an affinity for one another, what he calls “fit.”