John Chamberlain

The artist
Martha Jackson Gallery, New York (acquired from the above in 1960)
Allan Stone, New York (acquired by exchange with the above in 1963)
Sotheby's, New York, May 9, 2011, Lot 9 (consigned by the above)
Acquired by the present owner from the above

New York, Martha Jackson Gallery, New Forms - New Media I, June 1960
New York, Martha Jackson Gallery, New Forms - New Media II, September - October 1960, n.p., illustrated (installed in Martha Jackson Gallery, 1960), no. 14, illustrated
New York, Allan Stone Gallery, Mallary, Chamberlain, Cesar, Anderson, October 1963
Cleveland, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Sculpture by John Chamberlain, January 1967
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, John Chamberlain: A Retrospective Exhibition, December 1971 - February 1972, p. 25, no. 6, illustrated
New York, Allan Stone Gallery, John Chamberlain: Early Works, October - December 2003, pp. 2-3, illustrated (in installation at Allan Stone Gallery, New York, 1963), pp. 40-41, no. 20, illustrated in color, and illustrated in color on the cover (detail)
Chapel Hill, Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Circa 1958: Breaking Ground in American Art, September 2008 - January 2009, p. 31, illustrated in color
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, John Chamberlain: Choices, February 2012 - September 2013, p. 196, illustrated (in installation at Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, 1960) 
New York, Mnuchin Gallery, Chamberlain/De Kooning, November 2016 - January 2017, p. 47, illustrated in color, and p. 60, no. 10, illustrated in color 

John D. Morse, "He Returns to Dada," Art in America, vol. 48, no. 3, October 1960, p. 76, illustrated
Emily Genauer, "Art and the Artist," New York Post, January 8, 1972, illustrated
Irving Sandler, The New York School: The Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties, New York, 1978, p. 155, no. 114, illustrated (detail)
Julie Sylvester, John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture 1954-1985, New York, 1986, p. 47, no. 21, illustrated

This sculpture is in very good condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at +1 (212) 606-7254 for the report prepared by Jackie Wilson of Wilson Conservation, LLC.
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.
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Twisted, torqued and endlessly engaging, John Chamberlain’s Nutcracker from 1958 brings to life the spontaneous gesture that defined Abstract Expressionism in energetic, gravity-defying whirls of steel. Nutcracker is among Chamberlain’s earliest sculptures created from discarded car parts and has resided in only two private collections since its inception, including the distinguished collection of Allan Stone, one of Chamberlain’s greatest champions and supporters. The present work also bears an impressive exhibition history, having been included in significant shows at Martha Jackson Gallery, Allan Stone Gallery, The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Ackland Art Museum at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as both of the artist’s retrospectives at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York. Among the very first sculptures created from discarded car parts, Nutcracker is an elegant, complexly composed, and boldly multicolored example of Chamberlain’s artistic prowess. Nutcracker twists upward in a complex configuration of distorted car parts, bent and curved in a tensile vortex of robin’s egg blue, cream, black and brick red. An old fender contorted into a deep V shape fences in the core of the work: shiny black crags cleaving a central ivory blade. A dark red swath cascades gently down, echoing the sharp acute angles of the sculpture’s circumscribing exoskeleton. The juxtaposition of curves and hard edges, solid metal facets and negative space, bold color and worn surface coalesce in a single dynamic gestalt. These concavities and crevices reveal the very signature of Chamberlain’s artistic process, indicative of the creative ingenuity behind this innovative approach to mark making. Chamberlain’s manipulation of an industrial and non-traditional material into an active and kinetic force characterizes the very best of the artist’s output, including the present work. Although initially perceived as haphazard and even violent, Nutcracker possesses a clear harmony and sensuality in the organic forms of the metal. In interviews with Julie Sylvester, Chamberlain commented: “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.” (The artist, quoted in Julie Sylvester, John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture 1954-1985, New York, 1986, p. 15)

Chamberlain was born in 1927 in Rochester, Indiana. In 1951, he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; although Chamberlain would leave a year later, it was here that he first encountered a work by David Smith, an artist whose tendency toward abstract sculpture would open Chamberlain’s eyes to the possibilities of the medium. His enrollment at the avant-garde Black Mountain College, North Carolina in 1955 catalyzed his creative sculptural practice. Of this formative period in the artist’s career, Julie Sylvester writes: “Encouraged by [Charles] Olson’s emphasis on direct procedures, and fully sympathetic to his antipathy to the interference of the conceptual, Chamberlain began to make spontaneously calligraphic pen-and-ink drawings and abbreviated word-collages of nonsense – emphasizing the junction and disjunction of sounds more than Freudian word association. The poetics of structure were becoming sensate. Chamberlain’s drawn and written word-play is at least as significant as the [David] Smith-influenced sculptures he continued to construct at Black Mountain. The word collages presage the melodious non sequiturs that he often still uses in the titles of his sculptures to create verbal parallels to his images.” (Ibid., p. 28) Chamberlain moved to New York in 1957, the year before he created Nutcracker, which brilliantly exemplifies the poetic word-play in which he engaged at Black Mountain. Indeed, the lyrical title of the present work pops onomatopoetically, the “crack” of Nutcracker aurally echoing the fissures, ridges and creases inherent in the work.

In addition to his training at Black Mountain College, Chamberlain was heavily influenced by his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries. Nutcracker not only brings to the three-dimensional plane the gesture and action of his peers working with two dimensions, it also liberates sculpture from its traditional mold of carved stone or cast metal. Chamberlain’s initial use of color-coated steel was fortuitous, born out of his shortage of traditional material. Chamberlain noted: “I wasn’t interested in the car parts per se, I was interested in either the color or the shape or the amount. I didn’t want engine parts, I didn’t want wheels, upholstery, glass, oil, tires, rubber, lining, what somebody’d left in the car when they dumped it, dashboards, steering wheels, shafts, rear ends, muffler systems, transmissions, fly wheels, none of that. Just the sheet metal. It already had a coat of paint on it, and some of it was formed. You choose the material at a time when that’s the material you want to use, and then you develop your processes so that when you put things together it gives you a sense of satisfaction. It never occurred to me that sculptures shouldn’t be colored.” (Ibid., p. 15) Chamberlain manipulated different parts of cars and other machines in an additive process that resulted in a final thrust that is striking in its bold colors and jagged edges, elegant in its curvilinear form, and bears no resemblance to the original machine from which it came. Nutcracker is among Chamberlain’s initial pieces constructed from the metal as he found it and is characterized by its more muted color palette. For its velvety surface, swollen curves and ever-changing visual experience, Nutcracker’s stands as paradigm of Chamberlain’s early work and epitomizes the artist’s singular focus on form and composition.