A First Look Inside the Studio of an Art-World Giant

THE BOX from abroad was small and nondescript. Inside, bubble-wrapped packets of aluminum foil were twisted into arcs and circles, some sprouting multipronged feet. A kid’s toys? A drug dealer’s joke? “The customs agents opened the box and were unwrapping the foils—like, ‘Hey, what’s in here?’ ” says Prudence Fairweather, the recipient of the 2012 shipment. Inside were original models for large-scale sculpture by her late husband, John Chamberlain, who’d shaped each one by hand. They were bound for a retrospective of his work at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. “We lost quite a few,” she says.