Morton Livingston Schamberg
Morton Livingston Schamberg
1881 - 1918
American painter and photographer. After training as an architect at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (A.B., 1903), he studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, also in Philadelphia, from 1903 to 1906 under William Merritt Chase, with whom he travelled to Europe. From 1907 to 1909 he lived mostly in Paris, where he saw the work of major avant-garde artists, including Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse, and benefited from contact with Leo Stein, an important collector and writer. By 1909 Schamberg had responded to the example of Cézanne’s paintings, including simplified and more solid forms in his own work. Following his participation in the Armory Show in 1913, Cubism became the dominant element of his art, modified in such works as Figure B, Geometric Patterns (1913; Fort Worth, TX, Amon Carter Mus.) by his use of vibrant colour. About 1915 Schamberg met Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia in New York through Walter Arensberg and in works such as Mechanical Abstraction (1916; Philadelphia, PA, Mus. A.) achieved a synthesis of intense colour, Cubist form and mechanical subject-matter, which constituted the basis of his most original work.
Schamberg was a vocal proponent of avant-garde aesthetics; at the McClees Galleries, Philadelphia, in 1916 he organized Philadelphia’s First Exhibition of Advanced Modern Art, including works by both American and European artists. Among his innovations within American art were a DADA construction made, in collaboration with Elsa Freytag-Loringhoven, from a wooden mitre-box and plumbing trap (God, c. 1917; Philadelphia, PA, Mus. A.); an early Cubist stage set (1916); and paintings of machine forms such as Composition (1916; Columbus, OH, Mus. A.), which anticipated the combination of industrial theme and emphasis on simplified form and smooth finish, later termed Precisionism. About 1915 he produced some of the earliest photographs of the modern industrial city, also taking a number of portrait photographs. Schamberg died in the influenza epidemic of 1918 but in spite of his short career exerted an important influence on the early history of abstract art in the USA. [Wilford W. Scott. "Schamberg, Morton Livingston." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 11, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T076397.]
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