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Morton Livingston Schamberg
1881-1918
Composition
1916
16 1/16 x 10 3/16 inches (40.8 x 25.9 cm)
Pastel and graphite.
2019.87
Gift of the Modern and Contemporary Collectors Committee and the Brown Foundation, 2019.
Notes
Philadelphia artist Morton Schamberg studied architecture before enrolling at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1903. After traveling extensively in Europe he adopted a modernist idiom influenced by Fauvism and Cubism. A member of collector Walter Arensberg's circle, Schamberg met Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp in 1915 in New York and embraced their enthusiasm for mechanical imagery as a symbol of the modern age. This pastel belongs to a small group of works he created in 1916 based on machinery, here a book-stitching machine. It is closely related to Schamberg's most famous oil painting, a work of the same subject now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Arensberg Collection).
Inscriptions/Markings
Signed and dated at upper right: Schamberg / 1916.
Artist
Classification
Century Drawings
Catalog link
Department