John Chamberlain

Richard Bellamy, New York
Ed Cauduro, Portland, Oregon
The Lone Star Foundation, Inc., New York (acquired from the above in April 1978)
Acquired by the present owner from the above in August 1980

New York, Hansa Gallery, Contemporary Americans, 1958 
Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Sculpture by John Chamberlain, January 1967 
New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, John Chamberlain: A Retrospective Exhibition, December 1971 – February 1972, cat. no. 4, p. 24, illustrated, and pp. 6-7 (text)
Portland, Oregon, Portland Art Museum, 60s to 72: American Art from the Collection of Ed Cauduro, September – October 1972, cat. no. 16 
Santa Barbara, The Art Galleries, University of California; Phoenix, Phoenix Art Museum, 7 + 5: Sculptors in the 1950s, January – April 1976, cat. no. 5, p. 27, illustrated, and p. 25 (text)
New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, John Chamberlain: Choices, February – May 2012, cat. no. 3, p. 69, illustrated in color

Phyllis Tuchman, “An Interview with John Chamberlain,” Artforum, Vol. X, no. 6, February 1972, p. 40, illustrated, and p. 39 (text) 
Edward B. Henning, “An Important Sculpture by John Chamberlain,” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Vol. LX, no. 8, October 1973, p. 246 (text)
Wayne Andersen, American Sculpture in Process: 1930 – 1970, Boston, 1975, p. 127 (text)
Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 200 Years of American Sculpture, 1976, p. 264 (text)
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Art, New York, 1979, p. 64 (text)
Julie Sylvester, ed., John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture 1954 – 1985, New York, 1986, cat. no. 15, p. 46, illustrated, and p. 29, illustrated (and text)

This sculpture is in excellent condition and appears structurally sound. The scattered scratches, rust and paint losses are inherent to the nature of found materials and to the artist's process. The welds appear to be sound and secure. There is a ¼ x ½" white transfer accretion on the edge element on the verso (as illustrated in the catalogue) between 9 and 10 9 o'clock position. On the verso in the upper left quadrant, a fabric and cord element that exists sandwiched between two metal elements has frayed as is to be expected of this material over time.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

“Then, all of a sudden, it occurred to me one day that all this material was just lying all over the place. I saw the material as other people’s idea of waste. Shortstop was made at Larry Rivers’s house, and only years later did it occur to me that I had taken the material from an antique car of his – it was material from a 1929 Ford. ...Nevertheless I took a fender. I didn’t want to use it as a fender, so I drove over it a few times to rearrange its shape, which was the beginning of what I now know as process.”
The artist interviewed by Julie Sylvester, John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture, 1954-1985, New York, 1986, p. 15)

Executed in the artist’s thirty-second year, John Chamberlain’s Shortstop of 1957 was his first sculpture to include automobile parts and, as such, marks the very incipit of one of the most spectacularly recognizable artistic dialects to emerge from the second half of the Twentieth Century and can, moreover, justifiably be considered the artist’s most significant single work. Like other fabled moments of pivotal creative breakthrough – from Calder’s first mobile to Pollock’s first drip painting - the tale of Chamberlain’s artistic genesis has become legendary. In the Summer of 1957, together with his wife Elaine, he had rented Larry Rivers’ house in Southampton, New York. In the yard of the house there was a rusting, wrecked 1929 Ford: Chamberlain pulled off its fenders and shaped them by running them over with his car, before welding them together with rods to create his first sculpture out of car parts, Shortstop. Thus in a moment of spectacular audacity a new sculptural language was born, which subsequently filled the artist’s work for more than half a century and remains one of the most immediately recognizable artistic vernaculars of our time.

The art historical importance of Chamberlain's crushed metal structures has long been recognized, and Shortstop stands as the definitive archetype of the found object being elevated to primacy in his work. From 1954 to 1957, Chamberlain had worked primarily in the more traditional welded steel or iron, but Shortstop marks the moment where he began to manipulate derelict automobile parts into his own forms with simplicity and grandeur. The artistic climate of 1950s New York was immersed in the dogma of Abstract Expressionism, its emphasis on the primacy of gesture and conviction of individual artistic ambition and statement. By adding the third dimension to the spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism, Chamberlain liberated sculpture from the tradition of cast metal or sculpted stone. Similar to the New York School painters, Chamberlain never envisioned the end result at the beginning of a work. However, he alone among artists of the time brought this intuitive practice to sculpture. The Abstract Expressionist School’s interest in the physicality of paint and brushstroke was embraced by Chamberlain in his hands-on manipulation of metal forms into new shapes. Chamberlain combined different parts of automobiles or other machine scrap parts in an additive process where the endpoint bore no resemblance to the original object, and this occurs for the first time in Shortstop. Chamberlain embraced the urgency and violence of action that was so central to the art of Pollock, Kline, de Kooning and others, but by enlisting the automotive readymade he forged an unmistakable link to Duchampian precedent, and by introducing the raw face of a consumerist culture, albeit somewhat deformed, he anticipated the populist appropriation of Pop Art that became so omnipresent in the following decade. Thus in the many facets of its crumpled, fractured and twisted surfaces, Shortstop embodies a critical moment of art history, marking the juncture between disparate ideologies and, perhaps as much as any other single work, bridging the gap between Modernist and Post-Modernist attitudes in the middle of the last century.

Chamberlain's manipulation of volume forces the viewer to circumnavigate the sculpture when observing it, and his rigorous devotion to altering the very form of his materials ensures the viewer a complicated visual experience. A shadow of violence hangs heavy over the entire work, enshrouding its folded metallic carcass and serrated edges of torn metal with the memory of Chamberlain’s brutal action. Here we sense the visceral ferocity of an artistic event in much the same way as we may with a monumental black and white painting by Franz Kline. Yet at the same time, we may also detect the unavoidable suggestion of narrative violence, specifically the invocation of a car crash itself, which of course Andy Warhol would explore with such devastating effect several years later. Despite these powerful conveyances, Chamberlain also riffs on the presentation of a sanctified object of high art, turning industrial detritus into a beautiful sculpture composed of intersecting lines and dramatic forms that offers multiple suggestions of interpretation, from the physiognomic to the anthropomorphic to the archaeological. Although on initial viewing, one is tempted to read the activated surface in terms of violence, Chamberlain ultimately contradicts this facile interpretation. In interviews with Julie Sylvester during the early 1980s, Chamberlain commented on the early reactions to his sculptures, "I don't know why people think that my work is about violence. [Claes Oldenburg] got it and they didn't. He understood that there is a softness in the steel material, especially in the steel that covers a car." (Julie Sylvester, John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture, 1954-1985, New York, 1986, p. 15)

In the years following the execution of Shortstop, Chamberlain would elaborate his process and enhance the found properties of his objects by spraying multiple coats of automotive lacquer on the elements to give them a luscious, exaggerated visual effect. However, in his earliest sculptures such as Shortstop, one can revel in the raw and elemental nature of this momentous work, and appreciate Chamberlain's singular focus on the form and composition as primary over a set color palette. Diane Waldman noted, "Chamberlain was able to take advantage of a readymade situation which the automobile offered to circumvent the persistent problem posed by polychrome sculpture - that color appears to be an additive rather than an inherent feature of the work." (Exh. Cat., New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, John Chamberlain: A Retrospective Exhibition, 1971, p. 9)  Although his process may appear haphazard, Chamberlain's sculptures possess a clear unity and Shortstop is a particularly cohesive and well-balanced masterwork of his formative period.

Chamberlain's crushed assemblages of automotive steel have secured him a place in art history and examples reside in nearly every major museum collection. In the world of sculpture, Chamberlain is celebrated for the introduction of non-traditional materials, for an unprecedented sculptural process of clustering and folding metal. His uncanny ability to humanize cold mass-produced machine parts is wrought with contradictions and complexities, but Shortstop provides the ultimate vantage point to access the invention of this extraordinarily influential artistic journey.