JOHN CHAMBERLAIN | Untitled

Allan Stone, New York (acquired from the artist)
Sotheby’s, New York, The Collection Of Allan Stone, Vol. I, 9 May 2011, Lot 2
Acquired from the above by the present owner

New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, John Chamberlain: A Retrospective Exhibition, December 1971 - February 1972, p. 40, no. 22, illustrated (incorrect orientation)
New York, Allan Stone Gallery, John Chamberlain: Early Works, October - November 2003, n.p., no. 12, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. All surface irregularities are in keeping with the artist's choice of materials. There are some dents, rust, paint losses and scratches to the metal elements, which are in keeping with the artist's choice of materials and are inherent. Close inspection reveals a tiny area with adhesive residue on the painted metal and a light layer of superficial dust to the deep recesses. Very close inspection reveals some tiny and fine cracks in isolated places to the painted background. Inspection under ultra-violet light reveals a spot of inpainting to the top left extreme corner tip of the painted background.
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Untitled is one of John Chamberlain’s coveted three-dimensional paintings: enigmatic, unclassifiable mixed media hybrids of painting and sculpture from the artist’s effervescently creative early period. Initially readable as the intermediary stage in a transformation from an Abstract Expressionist canvas to a wholly metallic Chamberlain sculpture, Untitled seamlessly amalgamates elements from painting – patchworks of colour reminiscent of Willem de Kooning’s Gotham News (1955), for example – with the spliced, sculptural ‘fit’ essential to Chamberlain’s metallurgy with parts from American cars. Indeed, Donald Judd compared Gotham News to Chamberlain’s Zaar (1959) in his review of Chamberlain’s January 1960 exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, and the clamouring dynamism of Untitled causes an initial impression of the painting striving to become the sculpture; the present work a snapshot of this fluid inter-medium evolution. On closer inspection, however, the idiosyncrasies of Chamberlain’s work undercut both the supposed parallels with de Kooning, and any attempt to confine Chamberlain’s oeuvre to pre-existing aesthetic categories. More than almost any other artist of the 20th century, Chamberlain’s work has been compared to the work of other people. This desire to tame what we do not yet understand via comparison to what we think we do reveals less about the compared than it does about our inability to handle an oeuvre that boldly refuses linguistic description. “Everyone is so enamoured with things they already recognise”, Chamberlain said “the key activity in the occupation of art is to find out what you don’t already know” (John Chamberlain cited in: Adrian Kohn, ‘Understanding Unlikeness’, in: Exh. Cat., New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, John Chamberlain: Choices, 2012, p. 46). For these comparisons, it seems, are systematically defeated. While Chamberlain’s three-dimensional paintings exemplify the collage and assemblage techniques of the Dadaists and neo-Dadaists, their deliberate silence on contemporary politics divorces them from these movements. The objects involved in the techniques are the products of mass culture, recalling the compositions of Pop Art; and yet, unlike Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol, Chamberlain intended no fetishisation or celebration of the institutions generating these products. The emphasis on form alone, then, appears to place these paintings in the panoply of 1960s West Coast Minimalism, and yet Chamberlain rejects both Minimalism’s exclusion of colour, and its reverence for the so-called ‘immaculate object’; preferring to recognise the scavenged, lived and lifelike nature of his materials. Chamberlain’s works are not figurative, but neither are they formalist; they are not composed of Duchampian found objects, but their components are not strictly unfound, either, by virtue of being, in Chamberlain’s unique way, ‘chosen’. The artist expressed deep interest in Modernist sculptors like David Smith and Joseph Goto, Baroque sculpture such as the Altar of the Chair of St Peter (1666) and Futurist painting such as Abstract Speed (Passing Colour) (1913); and yet his works themselves bear no informative resemblance to any of these. Since linguistic description is just the placement of the described into what we take to be groups of things similar to it, it follows that, by all appearances, Untitled cannot be non-trivially described.

While taking the work on its own terms, we can plausibly argue that Chamberlain was ultimately interested in the physical properties of the objects closely associated with the most important abstractions around which we build our lives. The mass-produced Cadillac is associated strongly with the abstraction of the American dream, which has driven consumption, production, policy and movement in post-war America. Just as he once deconstructed the abstraction of money by measuring the contingently insignificant properties of coins and bills such as weight and colour, Chamberlain explored the brute materiality of metals and fabrics through works like Untitled. In allowing these objects to take on new forms, in allowing them to exist independently of the contingent and disposable abstractions with which they are associated, the world around us appears foreign and strange, and we are endowed with the mind of someone experiencing life for the first time.