The End of Winter by Wynn Chamberlain (1927-2014)

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Wynn (Elwyn) Moody Chamberlain 1927-1014
Chamberlain's work's are very rare as he stopped painting in 1969 and, as you can … Read more Wynn (Elwyn) Moody Chamberlain 1927-1014
Chamberlain's work's are very rare as he stopped painting in 1969 and, as you can read from his obit below, burned a lot of his work in 1972. Chamberlain has come into even more acclaim recently as his diptych "Poets Clothed and Naked" featuring Joe Brainard, Frank O'Hara, Joe LeSueur, and Frank Lima brought a record price of $75,000 at auction in 2017.

19 x 35 inches (board)
Signed lower right

Please read his New York Times obituary below to understand the importance of Chamberlain to 1960s New York:

Wynn Chamberlain, an Artist in Paint, on Screen and in Novels, Dies at 87
By Bruce Weber, December 6, 2014

In 1965, long before the Bowery in Lower Manhattan had begun its gentrifying ascent, the painter 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 Mr. Chamberlain, who was best known at the time for painting poets in the nude, 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 Mr. 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."

Mr. Chamberlain, who was a pal of the poet Allen Ginsberg and the avant-garde composer John Cage as well as a member of the Warhol cohort, was clearly at home in a gathering of eclectic artists, perhaps because his own career in the arts was pretty eclectic. In addition to painting, he produced an early play by the satirist playwright Charles Ludlam; he made a movie, Brand X, that some consider an underground classic, and he wrote novels set in locations like Morocco and India, where he spent a great deal of his later life.

As a painter, Mr. Chamberlain, whose work is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's collection, was known early in his career for realistic works with allegorical or symbolic overtones, often suggesting a dark, isolating or sinister quality to American life. In the 1960s, his work grew more abstract.

He was briefly notorious for a series of paintings of artists and writers, including Ginsberg, without their clothes, and in particular for a pair of group portraits, Poets Dressed and Undressed, depicting in one panel O'Hara, Joe Brainard, Joe LeSueur and Frank Lima in white shirts and blue trousers, and in the other the four in the same pose (three seated and one standing behind them) but naked.

Mr. Chamberlain, who sometimes used his given name, Elwyn, turned away from painting as he grew older. In 1967, he was a producer, at the Bouwerie Lane Theater in the East Village, of Conquest of the Universe, a frenetic collage by Mr. Ludlam dealing with the future of war and sex. (Mr. Ludlam, a priest of high camp, later became the longtime leader of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company.)

And in 1969, Mr. Chamberlain made Brand X, a cheerily vulgar parody of television programming and advertising whose featured performers included the political activist Abbie Hoffman, the playwright Sam Shepard, the actress Sally Kirkland and, from the Warhol universe, Ultra Violet, Candy Darling and Taylor Mead. The film disappeared after its premiere in 1970 — Mr. Chamberlain reclaimed a print from a former distributor in 2007 — and was not seen by an audience again until 2011.

Elwyn Moody Chamberlain was born in Minneapolis on May 19, 1927, to Lwyn Chamberlain, a stockbroker, and his wife, Nell. He began service in the United States Navy as World War II was coming to an end and subsequently earned a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Idaho and master's degrees in philosophy and art history from the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Mr. Chamberlain had his first solo show as a painter in 1951, in Milwaukee; his first show in New York, at the Edwin Hewitt Gallery, in 1954, was attended by Warhol, who was then a commercial artist, and the two became friends.

The family first moved to India in 1970, and in 1972 Mr. Chamberlain and his wife sold their house in Staatsburg, N.Y., in Dutchess County. Returning to remove belongings from a barn on the property, Mr. Chamberlain examined his paintings, decided he did not like them and burned them.

The family later lived in California, Mexico and Morocco before returning to India this year. Mr. Chamberlain's first novel, Gates of Fire, a story of Americans smuggling LSD into India, was published in 1978. His other novels include Then Spoke the Thunder (1989), an adventure tale also set in India, and Paradise, set in Marrakesh, Morocco; it was published online.

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 at the time. "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." See less