But what’s remarkable, as I learned during dinner, is that I was visiting just one of the many properties owned by the John Chamberlain Estate on the small island tucked between the north and south forks. There’s a jaw-dropping amount of Chamberlain sculpture stashed away there. There’s nothing in some storage unit in Long Island City. It’s all on Shelter Island. Throughout dinner, even as we ducked into the horse stalls now filled with the car parts, painted aluminum, and galvanized steel that made up his sui generis sculptures of blissful twisted metal, guests who knew Shelter Island secrets asked me, in a hushed tone, “But have you seen Chamberlain’s studio?”
What the estate has built in the 15 years since his death is a testament to the thirst for life that the artist had while on this earth. He spent decades as a living, breathing embodiment of midcentury New York’s art world dominance, shuttled between the Hamptons and SoHo, sporting a backstory worthy of a bildungsroman. Chamberlain was a Navy brat from the Midwest, who left the service to become a hairdresser in Chicago but was drawn with an intense magnetism toward the School of the Art Institute. After studying there, he found himself at the utopian Black Mountain College of the ’50s, working closely with the poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson.
After his time at Black Mountain, he burst onto the art scene in New York like a hurricane, catching the last gasp of the Cedar Tavern crowd and bonding with Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline during drinking binges. In the ’60s he established himself as a Hemingway-esque force of boozing and art making, constantly hanging out with the likes of John Cage and Jasper Johns. In 1962, Donald Judd mused that he might be the greatest living American sculptor. In 1964, Chamberlain represented the United States at the Venice Biennale.
Amid the tumult of pop art, he stumbled upon his eureka moment: Why not take the automobile, the ultimate symbol of postwar American industry, and smash it up until it resembled not a ready-made but an abstract sculpture á la de Kooning? These works went on to deeply influence artists ranging from Carol Bove to Rachel Harrison to Sterling Ruby to Isa Genzken. But it wasn’t just artists who were impacted: Frank Gehry previously said that his entire architectural practice owed a debt to Chamberlain.
Fashion designer Rick Owens has said something similar. After seeing pictures of the Chamberlain show of foam sculptures held at Virginia Dwan’s Los Angeles gallery in 1967, Owens rejiggered his whole aesthetic.
“I have arrogantly scorned mood boards in the past, but this image is part of my mental mood board and it has influenced pieces in every collection I have done since,” Owens once said of the foam sculptures. “It changed the way I look at draping on the human form, distorting the figure with perverse, extravagant volume to defy conventionally enforced stereotypes of beauty.”
