Composition

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).