John Angus Chamberlain, sculptor who used junked cars for his works, dies at 84

Sculptor John Angus Chamberlain, who spent his later years on Shelter Island, died Wednesday in New York City, according to his wife, Prudence Fairweather. He was 84.

Mr. Chamberlain’s work is in the collections of dozens of museums and this year, one of his earlier pieces sold for a personal record of $4.7 million.

The Guggenheim Museum, which is planning a retrospective of Mr. Chamberlain’s works to run from February 24 through May 13, 2012, released a statement calling him “one of the most important American sculptors of our time.”

Much of the material with which he worked came from scrapped automobiles and, as the New York Times put it in its obituary,  “Critics often saw his crumpled Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles as dark commentaries on the costs of American freedom.”

The artist rejected such analysis of his works. Ever self-effacing, Mr. Chamberlain commented, “Everyone always wanted to know what it meant. Even if I knew, I could only know what I thought it meant,” according to the Times.

Born in Rochester, Indiana. April 16, 1927, he grew up in Chicago, joined the Navy when he was 16 and served in the Pacific and Mediterranean during World War II. When he returned to Chicago, his goal was to become a hairdresser but he eventually went on to study at the Art Institute of Chicago and later Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

A biography posted by the Gagosian Gallery, which this year represented Mr. Chamberlain after many years of his affiliation with Pace Gallery, noted that the artist’s first exhibition in 1960 was at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City. His work has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, and in the 1960s, he participated in the São Paulo Bienal. He was included in the Venice Biennale in 1964.

Mr. Chamberlain has worked with other media and materials, including two-dimensional paintings made with automobile paint, tied urethane foam sculptures and crushed metal and melted Plexiglas sculptures. Since the mid-1990s, Mr. Chamberlain has experimented with large-format photography.

Earlier in his life, his wanderlust took him to live in California, New Mexico, Florida and Connecticut before settling on Shelter Island and New York City.

The Guggenheim Museum had its first retrospective of Mr. Chamberlain’s sculptures in 1971 and a second retrospective was organized in 1986 by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Several of his works have been displayed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

His numerous honors include the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture and the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the International Sculpture Center, Washington, D.C., both in 1993. He was given the National Arts Club Award in New York in 1997;  the Distinction in Sculpture Honor from the Sculpture Center in New York in 1999; and an honorary doctor of fine arts degree by the College for Creative Studies in Detroit in 2010.

The artist was once joked with a New York Times reporter, “I once had a drink with Billie Holiday, and I smoked a joint with Louis Armstrong. Those are my real claims to fame. Write that down.”

He was four times married, twice divorced and once widowed. Besides his wife, Mr. Chamberlain leaves two daughters, Alexandra and Phoebe Fairweather, and two sons, Angus and Duncan Chamberlain.