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The John Chamberlain Estate, Nordic Knots and Sotheby’s host an intimate dinner at Chamberlain’s private Shelter Island museum
On Thursday night, after arriving for dinner on a 36-acre expanse on the eastern end of Long Island, I watched as NBA star Kevin Love walked into cocktail hour on the grounds, which included a massive former horse barn, lines of stables, and a 19th-century farmhouse, all of which had been meticulously restored. The land, most of it operated by the Peconic Land Trust to ensure it’s never developed, ran down to the bay, and there were hiking paths running through the entire property. At one point, while snatching a locally grown radish from the spread of crudités wedged into what was normally a table’s outdoor fire pit, I saw Sofia Coppola and her husband, Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars, taking in what would be any art collector’s dream. Inside the main barn were dozens of John Chamberlain sculptures, each three times the size of six-foot-ten Utah Jazz starting forward Love.
But this wasn’t the big house of some art collector hosting a dinner during the Hamptons high season. It was the former home and studio of the legendary artist John Chamberlain, who died in 2011. The dinner, cohosted by Sotheby’s and Nordic Knots, was in celebration of an exhibition of Chamberlain works set to be held at the auction house’s Breuer building headquarters this fall.
It was, I was told, the first-ever dinner of this scale ever attempted in the space. Though back when he was alive, Chamberlain would host some different kinds of raucous dinners. They were at his home, or at his restaurant, which once served patrons on Grand Avenue in Shelter Island Heights, a quick late-night stumble away. He opened it in 1995, and it served a Buffalo Prairie Burger of the artist’s own recipe. The spot, of course, was called Chamberlain’s. It’s been described as the Rick’s Café of Shelter Island, the place where you’d walk in and see everyone you knew. The parties would go until dawn.
John Chamberlain's sculptures
John Chamberlain's sculptures Jason Schmidt/Chamberlain Estate
But what’s remarkable, as I learned during dinner, is that I was visiting just one of the many properties owned by the John Chamberlain Estate on the small island tucked between the north and south forks. There’s a jaw-dropping amount of Chamberlain sculpture stashed away there. There’s nothing in some storage unit in Long Island City. It’s all on Shelter Island. Throughout dinner, even as we ducked into the horse stalls now filled with the car parts, painted aluminum, and galvanized steel that made up his sui generis sculptures of blissful twisted metal, guests who knew Shelter Island secrets asked me, in a hushed tone, “But have you seen Chamberlain’s studio?”
What the estate has built in the 15 years since his death is a testament to the thirst for life that the artist had while on this earth. He spent decades as a living, breathing embodiment of midcentury New York’s art world dominance, shuttled between the Hamptons and SoHo, sporting a backstory worthy of a bildungsroman. Chamberlain was a Navy brat from the Midwest, who left the service to become a hairdresser in Chicago but was drawn with an intense magnetism toward the School of the Art Institute. After studying there, he found himself at the utopian Black Mountain College of the ’50s, working closely with the poets Robert Creeley and Charles Olson.
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After his time at Black Mountain, he burst onto the art scene in New York like a hurricane, catching the last gasp of the Cedar Tavern crowd and bonding with Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline during drinking binges. In the ’60s he established himself as a Hemingway-esque force of boozing and art making, constantly hanging out with the likes of John Cage and Jasper Johns. In 1962, Donald Judd mused that he might be the greatest living American sculptor. In 1964, Chamberlain represented the United States at the Venice Biennale.
Amid the tumult of pop art, he stumbled upon his eureka moment: Why not take the automobile, the ultimate symbol of postwar American industry, and smash it up until it resembled not a ready-made but an abstract sculpture á la de Kooning? These works went on to deeply influence artists ranging from Carol Bove to Rachel Harrison to Sterling Ruby to Isa Genzken. But it wasn’t just artists who were impacted: Frank Gehry previously said that his entire architectural practice owed a debt to Chamberlain.
Fashion designer Rick Owens has said something similar. After seeing pictures of the Chamberlain show of foam sculptures held at Virginia Dwan’s Los Angeles gallery in 1967, Owens rejiggered his whole aesthetic.
“I have arrogantly scorned mood boards in the past, but this image is part of my mental mood board and it has influenced pieces in every collection I have done since,” Owens once said of the foam sculptures. “It changed the way I look at draping on the human form, distorting the figure with perverse, extravagant volume to defy conventionally enforced stereotypes of beauty.”
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Stephen Alesch, Adrian Gaut Ben Rosser/BFA.com
Since Chamberlain’s death in 2011, his work has been seemingly omnipresent across institutions. There was a rotunda-wide show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum; a survey across the back of Dia Beacon; a show curated by Urs Fischer at the Aspen Art Museum; and a massive installation in a former wool and mohair factory in Marfa, maintained by The Chinati Foundation. He’s also been well supported by commercial galleries in the last 15 years. After being repped by Pace for decades, in 2011 he moved to Gagosian with a splashy two-gallery, two-continent debut in both New York and London. The show featured all-new car-crash sculptures. That December, he died at 84. The estate stayed with Gagosian, which gave him shows for years, and in 2019 the estate started staging shows with Hauser & Wirth.
And all the while, a key part of the Chamberlain mythos was hiding in plain sight on the island nestled under the North Fork of Long Island. The area was incredibly special to Chamberlain, who first came out East to stay with Larry Rivers in Southampton, long before the town was a bastion of Sant Ambroeus and Brandy Melville. Back then, it was basically a farm town.
It was there, at Rivers’s Southampton house, that Chamberlain had his revelation.
“It was like a light-bulb-goes-on moment,” Chamberlain told Bob Colacello for a feature in Vanity Fair in 2000. “I took these two fenders, I hacked and pounded them…. A couple of years later, I realized, Jesus, I’d taken Larry’s antique, and I really had no right to do that. But he didn’t put up much fuss.”
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The grounds of Chamberlain’s Private Shelter Island Museum
Jason Schmidt/Chamberlain Estate
Chamberlain was born in 1927. With the 100th anniversary of his birth approaching, his stepdaughter Alexandra Fairweather, the director of the John Chamberlain Estate, has decided to switch things up. She has spent nearly a decade at the helm of the artist’s legacy, and before taking on that role, Fairweather soaked up the mythos of her larger-than-life stepfather, bouncing around artist dinners in Manhattan and watching as those in the art scene mingled at their massive estate on Shelter Island. Since his death, the property has been totally off-limits.
“We aren’t open to the public—we’re trying to figure out, okay, how do we?” she told me. “We’re in a residential zone—how do we give people access to this space? We can’t let everybody come in for logistical reasons.”
That’s changing, slowly. In addition to holding the dinner Thursday, Fairweather opened the doors to Chanel earlier in the summer and hosted a Q&A with the brand’s arts and culture president, Yana Peel, moderated by Cultured magazine founder and editor Sarah Harrelson. My feed was a deluge of content from the afternoon, the unbelievable bay sight lines contraposed with the towering bent-car Chamberlain sculptures that have remained in situ since their creator’s passing.
Fairweather has also launched a podcast called On the Couch, for which she invites prominent East End creative types to come to the estate and sit down on one of Chamberlain’s typically bombastic pieces of furniture. Recent guests include artist David Salle, chef Jon Gray, and the artist-designer Misha Kahn.
The barn was one thing. I had to see the studio, and Fairweather agreed to open up the doors. I was given vague directions to go past the department store by the docks and told to park behind a black Range Rover. Somehow I found it. Fairweather came out of a low-slung bungalow and led me into the estate, hidden away off what counts as a major thoroughfare on Shelter. It’s all hidden away, undetectable while driving through—you could spend a lifetime on the island and have no idea it’s there.
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A scene from John Chamberlain's Shelter Island studio
Jason Schmidt/Chamberlain Estate
The massive studio was built from scratch in a parking lot, and much of Chamberlain’s large-scale work is still there, including the last piece he ever made and C’ESTZESTY, the 20-foot-tall chrome-plated steel work that was installed in front of the Guggenheim during the retrospective. Existing buildings were redone to accommodate a photo studio and a workshop where he could sit and make tinfoil works. So much of the ephemera of his life was still there on a desk: wine bottles, Theraflu boxes, tinfoil sculptures that worked as studies for the massive works, a deck of playing cards made by the artist Keith Tyson, little Niki de Saint Phalle toys, and his own recipe for chickpea soup with cumin and lemon.
Out back there was an indoor pool. For swimming laps? Not exactly. He had a commission to make a work for Donald Judd’s pool in Marfa, so he built a pool on Shelter Island to make sure it looked right.
“When thinking about the estate, we just thought, Wouldn’t it be better if we just left it the way that it was?” Fairweather said.
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Amy Astley, Carolyn Tate Angel, Rachel Chandler, Sofia Coppola
Ben Rosser/BFA.com
While it never really went away, the Chamberlain market got a shot in the arm earlier this year, when up for auction came a primo work from the estate of his longtime champion, Robert Mnuchin—who, in his last years, opened a Shelter Island restaurant called Léon 1909 with his daughter Valerie.
“And I mean, Jo-So fetched a wonderful price,” Fairweather said, referring to the work that sold for nearly $2 million at Sotheby’s in May. “I’m also really excited to see Chamberlain’s work to keep being put in evening sales.”
But before the evening sales, Sotheby’s will host a private sale exhibition of Chamberlain works, all of which will be installed at the Breuer building. Not all the works in the show are smashed-up cars, or even sculptures at all. Kathleen Hart, the Sotheby’s specialist in charge of the show, told me she hopes that works from other series, at lower price points, get some budding collectors into Chamberlain as a gateway drug.
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Alexandra Fairweather Ben Rosser/BFA.com
The show at the Breuer will run in tandem with the opening of the Independent Art Fair in the same space—and of course, it’s the building once home to the Whitney. And there are more plans on the horizon for the centenary—gallery shows yet to be announced, perhaps even a pop-up version of Chamberlain’s long-gone Shelter Island eatery. And there will certainly be more events at the showstopper of a Shelter Island home. And more podcast episodes.
At dinner, Coppola chatted with Vanity Fair special correspondent Derek Blasberg; Reed Krakoff and Delphine Krakoff told me about snagging slots off the wait list to see Michael Heizer’s City in remote Nevada; and Charles Stewart, the CEO of Sotheby’s, gave a heartfelt ode to Chamberlain and waxed rhapsodic about the feeling you experience when you get off the ferry from Sag Harbor (which is now peak Hamptons, despite its best efforts) and touch grass on the still-wild enclave of Shelter Island. As I sat next to Alexandra, I realized at one point that we were staring at the couch, as in the On the Couch couch, elephantine in its goofy scale, the mushy seat hard to scootch onto—perfect conversation fodder for the start of a podcast. Fairweather knows the foam furniture very well. She was an infant when the family lived in Elaine de Kooning’s old house in Springs, and she slept in a handmade oversized Chamberlain foam crib.
While walking around, I was introduced to Prudence Fairweather, the artist’s widow, whom Chamberlain met while Prudence was working as Dan Flavin’s studio manager. (One dinner guest told me about finding a Flavin sculpture placed nonchalantly in a corner of the studio, just an artwork made by a friend.)
Prudence explained that they’d had tiny dinners in the middle of the barn before, but nothing at this scale. The area was bought to be a storage space for crated-up works set to be en route to museums on loan. But they ended up installing the work there, out of the crates, as a very private Shelter Island Chamberlain museum, a little Marfa out East.
“Chamberlain always talked about how his works need a lot of space,” Prudence said as we walked through the sculptures.
And that was the place he wanted them to be. Back when the property was an operating horse farm, and Alexandra would ride there, the people running the stables had to tell Chamberlain to stop picking up his stepdaughter because he couldn’t stop talking about how badly he wanted the barn as his studio. But the owner would never sell. Even as he entered his 80s, his purpose-built studio a short drive away wasn’t big enough for his titanic sculptural visions. He wanted the horse barn. It wouldn’t happen in his lifetime—but soon after.
“Three months after his death, she told me she had to sell,” Prudence said. “And I looked up and I said, ‘Chamberlain, what have you done?’”
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