Car-avaggio of American Sculpture John Chamberlain is dead at 84

The Master of Mashed Metal, the Car-avaggio of Crushed Steel, relentlessly lowbrow and matter of fact about his work despite years of international acclaim, John Chamberlain has died at his home in Shelter Island, NY at age 84. Chamberlain took Duchamp’s anything-can-be-art promise literally, fusing pop art’s agressive contemporariness, Duchampian readymadiness, and poetic abstract expressioniness with an almost simpleminded straightforwardiness. His best pieces, several of which are permanently installed in Marfa, remain fresh as the day they were born (save for a certain nostalgia for brightly colored car bodies in this age of understated metallics). A retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York opens in February.