One of the most gratifying developments in the art world last year was the special attention given to the sculptor John Chamberlain. Although he has hardly been invisible of late—having exhibited regularly over the last five years—three recent exhibitions of Chamberlain’s work in Los Angeles, Houston, and New York allowed us to see the artist in an entirely new light. The shows were augmented by the publication of Julie Sylvester’s John Chamberlain: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture 1954-1985,[1] a most welcome event in itself but especially fortuitous this past year.

There are few artists over whom critical opinion has been so sharply divided as John Chamberlain. His work has always been conspicuous and instantly recognizable— factors which may have worked against him over time. From the start, he was accorded artistic and cultural notoriety because of his primary material: colored automobile steel. For some, this was cause for blind rejection; for others, it conferred on his work an instant celebrity status based on shock value. What could be more novel than crushed automobiles? No less an authority on contemporary taste than Hugh Hefner was an early collector, acquiring the 1964 Bags Down for the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

Thus, the issue at first was Chamberlain’s material, rather than the merits or failings of his art. Worse yet, his works were relegated to an aesthetic limbo by the view that they were simply so many car crashes, a sociological statement on the automobile