Oliver Morris-Jones
Specialist, Post War & Contemporary Art
Lot 10○
JOHN CHAMBERLAIN(1927-2011)Untitled
1964
1964
Amended
18 May 2023, 16:00 EDT
New YorkSold for US$453,975 inc. premium
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Andrew Huber
Head of Department
Randy Reynolds
Specialist, Head of Sale
JOHN CHAMBERLAIN (1927-2011)
Untitled
1964
painted and chrome-plated steel
23 1/2 by 35 1/2 by 24 1/2 in.
59.7 by 90.2 by 62.2 cm.
This work was executed in 1964.
1964
painted and chrome-plated steel
23 1/2 by 35 1/2 by 24 1/2 in.
59.7 by 90.2 by 62.2 cm.
This work was executed in 1964.
Footnotes
Provenance
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art Part I - Property of Various Owners including Mrs. Ethel Redner Scull, 10 November 1986, Lot 80
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner
Bonhams would like to thank the John Chamberlain Estate, Shelter Island, for their assistance in cataloguing this work.
John Chamberlain's artworks are as pictorial as they are sculptural. They are dynamic, imbued with a movement and force that culminates in an imploding density of form, color and material. Presented here are two works that wonderfully book-end the chief passage of Chamberlain's career before his passing in 2011. From 1964 and 2008 respectively, they demonstrate the consistency and rigor with which the artist refined and developed his ideas – artistic concerns that were borne of his years serving in the US Navy in the 1940s and developed through poetry and study at the famous Black Mountain College between 1955-56. What Chamberlain achieved over the course of his career was nothing short of one of the greatest contributions to American art in the post-war period, recognized by his inclusion in countless international museum collections including The Art Institute of Chicago; the Tate Collection, London; the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome.
Over the course of his career, Chamberlain would experiment with materials and media, including painting, photography, and film. He was undoubtedly a polymathic maker whose vision and tactile sense enabled him to grasp and focus any fabric under his will. Yet it was his sculptural works using automotive body panels and parts that truly captured his conceptual impetus, and those which have emerged as the most highly prized and sought-after by institutions and collectors around the world. Chamberlain made what is recognized as his first sculpture using automotive parts in 1957. This foundational early passage through to the mid-1960s would establish and lifelong working relationship with this source material – returning to it at the end of the 1970s after experimenting with steel drums, plastics, and urethane foam.
Evidenced in the museum-quality 1964 work, these key early steel sculptures are muscular and raw. Chamberlain presses and welds the elements together into a singular object with a forcefulness that wears the essential qualities of the metal on the surface. Employing a thick, often flaked, automotive paint, he gives each twisted panel a density and autonomy that dismembers the sculptural whole. We read the work as an aggregation of parts, each with form and color – a decidedly pictorial notion of sculpture that aligns closely with the academic concerns of the time. By contract, in Sorrysotee from 2008, we see an intensely assembled singular object that has developed a mechanical complexity beyond its earlier counterpart. Brighter in its colors, more detailed in its elements, it is a magnificent 'table-top' example that is dense and compelling, floating atop slender props with the impression of a cosmic implosion.
Alongside those artists who undoubtedly influenced him, Alexander Calder and David Smith, to his contemporaries that include Donald Judd and Antony Caro, Chamberlain stands apart as a sculptor with an undeniable pictorial and compositional sense. Perhaps most like Calder, his works are suspensions of painterly gesture and impression – they emanate a movement and relational aesthetic that is deeply reminiscent of abstract painting and an organic, timeless notion of sculptural form. Writing in 1963, Judd himself commented: 'Chamberlain's sculpture is simultaneously turbulent, passionate, cool, and hard. The structure is the passionate part. The obvious comparison is the structure of Baroque art: there is a diagrammatic resemblance and one of emotion' (Donald Judd, 'John Chamberlain: Another View' in Donald Judd Writings, New York 2016, p. 117). Chamberlain took this innate sculptural sense and renewed the emotional in what had become a Modernist field concerned with 'specific objectivity.' The two sculptures presented here are glorious testament to one of America's greatest twentieth century artists.
Saleroom notices
A third party has provided an irrevocable bid on this lot (Lot 10) which Bonhams will execute during the sale such that the lot will sell at the level of the irrevocable bid amount unless there are any higher bids. These lots are subject to bidding by parties with a financial interest in the results of sale.