Artist Birthday: John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain was part of the constructed steel sculpture movement that blossomed following World War II (1939–1945). Constructed sculpture had been experimental before the war, and became the norm for modernist sculpture thereafter, defying centuries of the academic tradition of carved, modeled, or cast sculpture.

Artist birthday for 16 April: John Chamberlain (1927–2011, United States)

Sculptor John Chamberlain was part of the generation that challenged traditional notions of what sculpture can be.

John Chamberlain, Glossalia Adagio, 1984. Painted and chrome-plated steel automobile parts, 210.8 x 221 x 315 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. © 2025 John Chamberlain / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. (PMA-9333cmars)

Although Chamberlain briefly diverged from auto parts briefly to work in unpainted galvanized steel, although he never worked in cast metals. He preferred the immediacy and expressive potential of twisted and manipulated auto parts. Works such as Glossalia Adagio show Chamberlain at the height of his mature style. Such work reveals the influences of the found objects of Surrealism and Dada, with an ironic nod to Pop Art in the elevation of junked parts of the American automobile culture. Throughout his career, Chamberlain's work never alluded to specific imagery or social commentary. In the obvious gestures inherent in his work, Chamberlain's sculptures were expressions of powerful visual force. Glossalia Adagio possibly refers to the Italian glossolalia which means "speaking in tongues," and adagio, which means "slowly." It may reference ecstatic utterances during a religious service.

Artists who were coming of age in the mid-1940s had matured during the Great Depression (1929–1940). The Depression was a period of severe world economic downtown. In terms of art, American patronage turned inward towards Social Realist art that depicted uplifting scenes of American life. European modernism was rejected for the most part. The artists in the 1940s who found Social Realism vapid and superficial venerated the abstraction and modernism of pre-World War II Europe, particularly Surrealism with its emphasis on pure, automatic creation unfettered by logic or aesthetic formulas.

Although the modernist New York School that developed was a diverse group, the subsequently dubbed movement Abstract Expressionism did contain two dominant strains, gestural painting and color field.  The notion of "gestural" form was also applied to the art of sculptors who emerged during the early 1960s. Gesture referred to the unique and spontaneous touch (or "handwriting") of the artist, which is certainly present in the work of Chamberlain.

Born in Rochester, Indiana, Chamberlain studied to be a hair stylist in Chicago on the GI Bill after World War II. While working as a hair stylist and makeup artist, he taught himself to draw. Inspired by the art in the Art Institute of Chicago, he enrolled in the School of the Art Institute from 1950 to 1951. Uninspired by the conservative, narrow-minded faculty there, he tried at the University of Illinois, but found the same milieu. He learned of Black Mountain College in North Carolina and studied there from 1955 to 1956.

Black Mountain College was a cutting edge art school where many of the first generation of Pop artists studied. The alumni included many noted artists, musicians and poets. The Black Mountain poets were renowned for encouraging improvisational thinking, random combinations of words, and fragments of ideas. While Chamberlain began writing poetry in their style, they were more instrumental in leading him to explore the use of unconventional materials and techniques in sculpture. Inspired further by David Smith (1906-1965), he began making welded sculptures while there.

Moving to New York, Chamberlain lived initially with painter Larry Rivers (1923–2002). While there he discovered a junk car on the property and, being short of materials to make sculpture, appropriated the bumpers. The bumpers became Shortstop (1957), Chamberlain's first sculpture made from salvaged auto parts. He was first noticed by the "art world," when he exhibited his car part sculptures in the group show The Art of Assemblage in 1961 at the Museum of Modern Art. That show included the work of pioneer assemblage sculptor Louise Nevelson (1900-1988).