Wynn Chamberlain

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", Chamberlain has two works, Interior: Late August (1955) and The Barricade (1958), on permanent exhibition in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Elwyn Chamberlain was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1927. 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 1949. He then took a master's degree in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, while continuing to paint and studying with the Magic realist artist, John Wilde.

He had his first solo exhibition in Milwaukee in 1951, 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.

In the 1960s Chamberlain also became involved in Andy Warhol's circle. In the latter part of that decade he 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. 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 Sheppard in the cast.

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