Helen Hsu

John Chamberlain rose to prominence in the late 1950s with energetic, vibrant sculptures hewn from disused car parts, achieving a three-dimensional form of Abstract Expressionism that astounded critics and captured the imaginations of fellow artists. For a seven-year period in the mid-1960s, the artist abandoned automotive metal and turned to other materials. Motivated by scientific curiosity, Chamberlain produced sculptures in unorthodox media, such as urethene foam, galvanized steel, paper bags, mineral-coated Plexiglas and aluminum foil. Since returning in 1972 to metal as his primary material, Chamberlain limited himself to specific parts of the automobile, adding color to found car parts, dripping, spraying and patterning on top of existing hues to an often wild effect. In recent years, the artist has embarked on the production of a new body of work that demonstrates a decided return to earlier themes. John Chamberlain: Choices accompanies the Guggenheim Museum exhibition, which comprises 95 works, from the artist’s earliest monochromatic iron sculptures to the outsized foil creations he is working on today, encompassing shifts in scale, material and methods informed by the collage process that has been central to Chamberlain’s working method. This fully illustrated exhibition catalogue includes essays by Susan Davidson, Donna De Salvo, Dave Hickey, Adrian Kohn and Charles Ray with an extensive chronology by Helen Hsu and a lexicon by Don Quaintance.

Now available in paperback, Chaos and Classicism explores the classicizing aesthetic that followed the immense destruction of World War I: the poetic dream of antiquity in the Parisian avant garde of Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso; the politicized revival of the Roman Empire under Benito Mussolini by artists such as Giorgio de Chirico and Mario Sironi; and the austere functionalist utopianism of the Bauhaus, as well as, more chillingly, the pseudo-biological classicism, or Aryanism, of nascent Nazi society. Among the other artists surveyed here are Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, André Derain, Gino Severini, Jean Cocteau, Le Corbusier, Amédée Ozenfant, Madeleine Vionnet, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio Morandi, Massimo Campigli, Achille Funi, Ubaldo Oppi, Gio Ponti, Arturo Martini, Georg Kolbe, Oskar Schlemmer, Otto Dix, Georg Scholz, Georg Schrimpf, Wilhelm Schnarrenberger and August Sander.

Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936 explores the classicizing aesthetic that followed the immense destruction of World War I. Accompanying the Guggenheim's exhibition of the same name, it examines the interwar period in its key artistic manifestations and their interpretations of classical values and aesthetics: the poetic dream of antiquity in the Parisian avant garde of Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso; the politicized revival of the Roman Empire under Benito Mussolini by artists such as Giorgio de Chirico and Mario Sironi; and the austere functionalist utopianism of the Bauhaus, as well as, more chillingly, the pseudo-biological classicism, or Aryanism, of nascent Nazi society. This presentation of the seismic transformations in interbellum French, Italian and German culture encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, film, fashion and the decorative arts. Among the other artists surveyed here are Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, André Derain, Gino Severini, Jean Cocteau, Le Corbusier, Amédée Ozenfant, Madeleine Vionnet, Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Carlo Carrà, Giorgio Morandi, Massimo Campigli, Achille Funi, Ubaldo Oppi, Felice Casorati, Giuseppe Terragni, Gio Ponti, Arturo Martini, Georg Kolbe, Oskar Schlemmer, Otto Dix, Georg Scholz, Georg Schrimpf, Wilhelm Schnarrenberger and August Sander.