John Chamberlain

 John Chamberlain (1927-2011) was an American artist known for his large, colorful sculptures made from discarded auto parts. 

He was born in Rochester, Indiana . His father was a fifth-generation saloon keeper, his mother a part-time waitress. His parents divorced when he was four and he was taken to Chicago live with his maternal grandmother.

Chamberlain joined the Navy in 1943. He was just sixteen, and lied about his age. When he returned to Chicago he studied hairdressing on the G.I. Bill and became a hair and makeup instructor.

He was interested in learning to draw and enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He had disagreements with his instructors and quit after a year.

Chamberlain found his niche at Black Mountain College, which he attended from 1955 to 1956. 

A visit with painter Larry Rivers in Southampton in 1957 led to his career as a sculptor of metal. He found two fenders from a 1929 Ford on River’s property. He ran over them with a truck and fit them together to create a sculpture. 

Chamberlain moved to New York and managed to find the materials, and the space, to create his large sculptures. He became part of the art scene at Max’s Kansas City and Cedar Tavern. He had a reputation for being a bit gruff and was once arrested when he got into a fight with a police officer. He met other artists at the bars whose works he found inspiring. “[Franz] Kline gave me the structure and [Willem] de Kooning gave me the color,” he said. Chamberlain often created small sculptures from cigarette packs and paper bags to gift his friends. Andy Warhol bought one of Chamberlain’s large sculptures in 1967. 

He had his first solo show in New York in 1958 at Davida Gallery on Fifth Avenue. His art gained recognition and he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1964, and had his first retrospective at the Guggenheim museum in 1971. In 2011, one of Chamberlain’s sculptures sold at auction for $4.7 million, a record for his work.

Chamberlain was married four times and had four children. He traveled extensively during his career, setting up studios in New York, New Mexico, Florida, Connecticut, and finally on Shelter Island, New York, where he died at age 84.

His works are in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, MoMA, the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou and many other major museums around the world.