Queer Places:
5120 Lyndale Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55419
705 Mabelle St, Moscow, ID 83843
University of Wisconsin-Madison, 716 Langdon St, Madison, WI 53706
222 Bowery, New York, NY 10012
Elwyn Moody "Wynn" Chamberlain, (19 May 1927 – 27 November 2014), was an American artist, film maker and author. Described by The New York Times as a "pioneer realist painter",[1] Chamberlain has two works, Interior: Late August (1955) and The Barricade (1958), on permanent exhibition in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.[2]
Elwyn Moody Chamberlain was born in Minneapolis on May 19, 1927, to Lwyn Chamberlain, a stockbroker, and his wife, the former Nell Moody. After serving in the US Navy from 1944 to 1946, he studied art at the University of Idaho, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in English in 1949. He then took a master's degree in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, while continuing to paint and studying with the Magic realist artist, John Wilde.[4]
He had his first solo exhibition in Milwaukee in 1951,[5] and three years later he had his first New York City solo exhibition at the Edwin Hewitt Gallery. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s his realist landscapes, interior scenes, and allegorical paintings were exhibited throughout the United States and in Europe. Although his work tended to become more abstract in the 1960s, he had a major exhibition of nude portraits at the Fischbach Gallery in 1965. The portraits were of New York literary and artistic figures of the time. One of the most famous of these is Poets Dressed and Undressed, two panels portraying Joe Brainard, Frank O'Hara, Joe LeSueur and Frank Lima. The exhibition also included a nude portrait of Allen Ginsberg who wrote the publicity flyer for the exhibition (Chamberlain's "Nakeds") as well as notes for the catalogue, wherein he equated Chamberlain's nudes with the ecstatic poetry of William Blake.[6]
Chamberlain was a pal of the poet Allen Ginsberg and the avant-garde composer John Cage and in the 1960s Chamberlain also became involved in Andy Warhol's circle.[7] At the beginning of 1963, the architect Philip Johnson approached Andy Warhol, along with Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana, Peter Agostini, John Chamberlain, James Rosenquist, Robert Mallary, and Alexander Lieberman, to create a mural-sized work to adorn the outside of the Panoramic Cinema Theater, a centrepiece of the New York State Pavilion at the World’s Fair, which was to be held the following year. Warhol decided to reproduce, on a monumental scale, 13 mugshots of various criminals taken from a booklet entitled The Thirteen Most Wanted Men produced by the New York Police Department. Warhol’s exact reasons for choosing this subject matter are unclear. According to John Giorno, , a member of the artist’s inner circle, the idea came from the painter Wynn Chamberlain, whose lover at the time was an NYPD officer who, according to Giorno, ‘obtained’ a large envelope filled with various crime photos, mug shots and archival photographs which he passed on to Warhol.
Elwyn Chamberlain and Donald Nardona, 1954
Poets Dressed and Undressed, two panels portraying Joe Brainard, Frank O'Hara, Joe LeSueur and Frank Lima,
by Wynn Chamberlain
In 1965, long before the Bowery in Lower Manhattan had begun its gentrifying ascent, Wynn Chamberlain had a studio at 222, a building that now has a Green Depot store on the ground floor but was then in a derelict neighborhood, with a mission across the street. On the evening of April 22, a Thursday, however, it became the center of hip, artsy New York when Chamberlain hosted a literary gathering that featured a reading by William S. Burroughs, the author of "Naked Lunch." The crowd of 130 people -- including the pop artist Andy Warhol, the painters Larry Rivers and Barnett Newman, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, the poet and art curator Frank O'Hara, and the photographers Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon -- was appreciative as Burroughs read, with his characteristic eccentric delivery, a futuristic short story. As The New York Times described it, he "livened up his one-syllable-at-a-time reading with sudden bursts of dramatic activity, eventually ripping down a white-sheet backdrop and uncovering a painting of horrifying tarantulas."
In the latter part of the 1960s Chamberlain increasingly turned from painting to film and theatre. In 1967 he produced the premiere of Charles Ludlam's Conquest of the Universe at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre, directed by John Vaccaro and starring several members of Andy Warhol's Factory, including Taylor Mead and Ultra Violet.[8] Chamberlain also wrote, produced and directed the film Brand X which premiered in 1970. The film, a satire on American television commercials, included Taylor Mead, Candy Darling, Abbie Hoffman, Baby Jane Holzer and Sam Shepard i in the cast. On 7 September 1965, in Staatsburg, New York,[9] Chamberlain married Sally Stokes, the former wife of John Sergeant Cram III and a daughter of Frederick Hallock Stokes.[10][11] The couple had two children in 1968, twins Sara Ninigret Stokes Chamberlain and Samuel Wyandance Stokes Chamberlain.[12]
In 1970, Chamberlain left the underground scene and the art world behind. He burned his paintings and left for India with his wife and children.[13] The family were to live there for five years - in the Terai with a Tantric yogi, in the village of Kollur in Karnataka, and in Bangalore, in an old colonial mansion once owned by Arthur Wellesley.[14] On their return to the United States in 1975, they bought land in California's Mendocino County, lived in a tent for three years, built their house and grew most of their own food.[15] It was during this time that Chamberlain became a novelist. His first novel, Gates of Fire, was published by Grove Press in 1978. Gates of Fire, like his third novel, Then Spoke the Thunder, is set in India. As of 2009 Chamberlain was living in Marrakech, Morocco.[16]
The first public screening of "Brand X" in 40 years took place in 2011 at the New Museum on the Bowery, across the street from the site of Mr. Chamberlain's 1965 soiree. It was more than a coincidence; the film was shot largely in the vicinity. "It's an opportunity to look at the neighborhood -- how it was," Ethan Swan, who works with the museum's archive of neighborhood artists and who organized the screening, told The Times then. "There was this creative richness that came from a really interesting combination of cheap rent and minimal police presence. There was nobody saying: 'You can't weld on the sidewalk.' 'You can't live in a loft.' It allowed for so much to happen."
The family moved back to India in 2014. Chamberlain died in New Delhi, India, of heart failure on 27 November 2014, at the age of 87.[17]
My published books:p>
