“It’s taken me a long time, going to different materials and being engaged with different materials. My particular feeling is, as I’ve said, because I like them, I pay attention as to where they’re at. Then whatever I do to them, I can do to them and if it becomes something that hasn’t been done to them before in that usage, then I feel that there’s something there. And I play with that.”
—John Chamberlain

 

Although American sculptor John Chamberlain would experiment with a range of non-traditional materials over the course of his five-decade career, the dynamic interplay of crumpled forms and complex spatial arrangements that the artist was able to achieve in his work with crushed automobile parts would come to define his sculptural project. A piece of remarkable grace and power, Druids Cluster (Swish) seems to defy the weight of its materials to float effortlessly against the wall, its gently folded forms holding rhythm and movement in perfect equilibrium. The work comes to auction with exceptional provenance, originally held in the personal collection of art dealer Heiner Friedrich - co-founder of the Dia Foundation in Beacon and the Lone Star Foundation, which merged in 1980 to form the esteemed Dia Art Foundation in collaboration with Philippa de Menil.

 

Seen in Steel

 

Whilst the artist had used colour in his sculptural works before 1976, it was only when returning to this distinctive material in the mid-1970s that he started to supplement the inherent coloration of his found metal with his own painted additions. A close reader of Abstract Expressionism and a firm friend of Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline, in Druids Cluster (Swish) Chamberlain augments his ground with splashes of bold colour and assertive line, creating expressive striations that flex against the sculpture’s more contingent forms. Building up layers of vibrant yet delicate skeins of colour that seem to fall lightly on the sculpted contours of warped metal the piece is animated with its own, lively personality, the chromatic depth and gestural combinations of drips and splashes achieved by the artist here working within the conceptual frameworks of Abstract Expressionism to bring Jackson Pollock’s immersive ‘all-over canvases’ into three dimensions.  

 

Despite its graceful contours, Druids Cluster (Swish) still possesses a crunching muscularity, the suggestion of violence held in its twisted contortions and more jagged edges alleviated by the all-over harmonies achieved by the artist’s interventions. This compositional balance lends the work its more organic, intensely naturalistic quality, endowing it with a sense of structural coherence. Chamberlain has referred to this unexpected but seamless interlocking of his sculptural pieces as the ‘fit’, where one attains ‘a certain sense of control’ over the object, a process that is both idiosyncratic and non-formulaic.ⁱ In Druids Cluster (Swish) automobile parts curl and coil like knotted roots, the greens and blues of the painted metal softening the harsh edges of the material and hinting at the central paradox of Nature as combining both creation and destruction, life and death.

 

Drawing us close to this line between creation and destruction, Druids Cluster (Swish) draws not only on the gestural immediacy of Abstract Expressionism, but also on Pop Art’s interest in the industrially reproduced and the objects of everyday consumer life. Andy Warhol’s famous and forensic dissection of traffic road accidents in his Death and Disaster series stands as a particular touchstone here, the two artists sharing a formal fascination for the crumpled metal, as well its capacity for commentary on mid-century America’s commodity culture, and the repurposing of these consumer products into the objet d’art.

 

Chamberlain’s compulsion to integrate the everyday, the real, into the work of art and the process itself is analogue to the work of contemporary European nouveau réalistes artists - whose own links to the American Pop Art movement were evident in 1962’s International Exhibition of the New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. However, whilst the nouveau réalistes were still indebted to the legacy of Marcel Duchamp and the Readymade, and often overtly entrenched in old struggles against both bourgeois and socialist realist figurative painting and sculpture, Chamberlain’s work is of a uniquely American perspective and character. Druids Cluster (Swish) seeks not to critique American industrial society, but to recognise its potentiality, the possibility that scrap metal and waste by-products might be repurposed into a uniquely American aesthetic practice.

 

That both Chamberlain and Warhol chose the automobile - the symbol sine qua non of post-war America – as both the material and the object of their work respectively speaks to the centrality of their artistic investigations in any history of post-war art as it developed in the United States. Chamberlain’s own contribution is twofold, bringing the lessons of post-war American abstraction into the material realm of the familiar and everyday, and his translation of the gestural exuberance of their mark-making into the spatial dimensions of sculpture. Druids Cluster (Swish) encapsulates all of these tendencies, a writhing and powerful testament to both delicacy and brutality - a monument to the muscular power of an America then at the vanguard of creative expression.

 

Collector’s Digest

• Internationally renowned for his twisted metal sculptures and experiments with other industrial materials, examples of John Chamberlain’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tate Collection in London.

• Over the years major retrospectives of Chamberlain’s work across a range of media including photography, film, sculpture, and painting have been held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Since his death in 2011, Chamberlain has been the subject of several solo exhibitions, the most recent of which – John Chamberlain: Five Decades held at Mnuchin Gallery in New York – gave new insight into the development of the artist’s distinctive and diverse practice. 

 

 

ⁱ John Chamberlain, quoted in Phyllis Tuchman, ‘An Interview with John Chamberlain’, Artforum, February 1972, vol. 10, no. 6, online.