Morton Livingston Schamberg 1881 - 1918

The artist
Dr. and Mrs. Ira Leo Schamberg (the artist's nephew), Jenkintown, Pennsylvania
By descent to their children
Salander O’Reilly Galleries, New York
The Regis Collection, Minneapolis, Minnesota (by 1987)
Salander O’Reilly Galleries, New York              
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 2005

Dallas, Texas, The Dallas Museum for Contemporary Arts, American Genius in Review No. 1, May-June 1960, no. 48, illustrated (as Machine Still Life)
Minneapolis, Minnesota, Walker Art Center; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Institute of Art; Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco, California, San Francisco Museum of Art, The Precisionist View in American Art, November 1960-August 1961, p. 57, illustrated p. 29 (as Still Life, Camera Flashlight)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Paintings by Morton L. Schamberg, 1963, no. 31
New York, Zabriskie Gallery, Morton L. Schamberg, January 1964, no. 16
Albuquerque, New Mexico, University Art Museum, The University of New Mexico; San Antonio, Texas, Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute; San Francisco, California, San Francisco Museum of Art; Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Cubism, Its Impact in the U.S.A. 1910-30, February-August 1967, no. 50, p. 51 (as Camera Flashlight)
Huntington, New York, Heckscher Museum; Southampton, New York, The Parrish Art Museum, The Students of William Merritt Chase, September-December 1973, no. 81, p. 40 (as Camera Flashlight)
Washington, D.C., National Collection of Fine Arts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Pennsylvania Academy Moderns 1910-40, May-September 1975, no. 36, p. 32 (as Camera Flashlight)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, In This Academy, April-December 1976, no. 298, pp. 211, 311 (as Camera Flashlight)
New York, Salander O’Reilly Galleries; Columbus, Ohio, Columbus Museum of Art; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, The School of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Peale House Galleries; Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Milwaukee Art Museum, Morton Livingston Schamberg, November 1982-March 1984, no. 38, p. 12,  illustrated; also illustrated in color on the cover (as Camera Flashlight)
Washington, D.C., Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Morton Livingston Schamberg: Color and Evolution of his Paintings, 1984, no. 27
Brooklyn, New York, The Brooklyn Museum; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute; Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Atlanta, Georgia, The High Museum, The Machine Age in America 1918-1941, October 1986-February 1988, no. 195
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, American Modernism: The Shein Collection, May 2010-January 2011, no. 16, pp. 10, 94, 96-97, 141-42, illustrated in color p. 95

Ben Wolf, Morton Livingston Schamberg, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1963, no. 49, p. 54, illustrated p. 104 (as Camera Flashlight)
William C. Agee, “New York Dada, 1910-30,” The Avant Garde, ArtNews Annual, vol. 34, 1968, p. 110
Milton W. Brown, “From an Evangelical Tent Show into a Modern Museum,” ArtNews, vol. 78, October 1979, illustrated p. 76
William C. Agee, “Morton Livingston Schamberg: Color and the Evolution of His Painting,” ArtNews, vol. 57, November 1982, pp. 116, 118, illustrated
Grace Glueck, “Art: The Pioneering of Morton Schamberg,” The New York Times, November 12, 1982
William C. Agee, “Morton Livingston Schamberg: Notes on the Sources of the Machine Images,” New York Dada, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, ed., New York, 1986, p. 72
Stephen May, “American Modernism: The Shein Collection,” Antiques and the Arts Weekly, June 4, 2010, pp. 30-31, illustrated

Morton Livingston Schamberg’s Painting VI embodies the bold direction the artist took in the first decades of the 20^th century. Painted in 1916, the work belongs to the last and most important period in the artist’s brief career, during which he began to engage with mechanical themes. Today these works are recognized for their innovative style and sophisticated intent, establishing Schamberg as an important precursor to Precisionists such as Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, who would continue to explore the imagery of the machine after Schamberg’s premature death in 1918.

In Painting VI, Schamberg depicts a piece of textile machinery, a subject likely inspired by the equipment he saw illustrated in machinery catalogues that he borrowed from his brother-in-law, who was then employed in the stocking and hosiery industry. Schamberg likely derived the imagery for several of the machine paintings from this source, but the series also includes depictions of a camera and a telephone (fig. 1). Although the object is undoubtedly industrial in nature, Schamberg’s reductive treatment makes it difficult to immediately identify and for many years it was incorrectly identified as a “camera flashlight.” Indeed, the artist simplifies the components of the object to their most basic, geometric forms and places the machine in an amorphous setting, dissociating it from the larger context of the factory. As Schamberg’s subject approaches abstraction he invites the viewer to consider it not for its function, but rather for its distinctive shape, color and form.

Born in 1881 in Philadelphia, this little known yet hugely significant painter and photographer originally trained as an architect. After receiving his degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1903, however, Schamberg enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts where he studied under William Merritt Chase and practiced his teacher’s impressionist style of execution. After completing his studies at the Academy, he made several trips to Europe between 1904 and 1909, at times accompanied by both Chase and Sheeler—his close friend and another of Chase’s pupils. The time Schamberg spent in Europe allowed the artist to reaffirm his admiration for old masters such as Frans Hals, as well as the painters of the Italian Renaissance. He was, however, also introduced to the works of European modernist painters for the first time. He came to appreciate the underlying geometry he saw in compositions by Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne, as well as Henri Matisse’s use of vivid, non-associative color. 

Schamberg’s immersion with these modes of visual expression proved deeply influential. Though he did not fully abandon realistic subject matter, the works he created upon his return to the United States display a new concern for the structural rather than the representational function of color and he increasingly flattened and fragmented forms. By the 1913 Armory Show, in which the artist exhibited five works, his embrace of modernist abstraction was fully realized. “It is not the business of the artist to imitate or represent nature,” he said in this same year. “Art is creative, or, rather, interpretive. The artist does not reproduce that which is in itself pleasurable, he receives a pleasurable sensation from nature and within himself translates that sensation into terms of plastic expression, thereby creating a work of art which presents this pleasure in plastic form” (Ben Wolf, Morton Livingston Schamberg, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1963, p. 27).

In Painting VI Schamberg does not seek to depict the machine faithfully but instead explores the visual relationships between its various components. As Wilford W. Scott writes, “the white dominant disk relates formally to a much smaller red disk just below and to the right. Near the left margin of the composition a black disk (perhaps a roller) appears above a larger dark shape and a bright yellow-and-white shape. Two dark and two light diagonals bisect the composition from the left to the right, and these linear elements are counterbalanced by four slender rodlike shapes emerging from the heart of the machine” (American Modernism: The Shein Collection, Washington, D.C., 2010, p. 96). Painting VI demonstrates the artist’s critical understanding of color principles and compositional design. The imagery of the painting invites comparisons with the work of Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, who similarly utilized the machine as subject matter in this period (fig. 2). Schamberg undoubtedly encountered their Dadaist ideas in the wake of the Armory Show but, as Scott explains, he never subscribed to the satirical undertones embedded in the work of these artists. Schamberg’s intent allows Painting VI to “avoid a typical ‘Dada’ subversion of traditional art and meaning…In discovering a new subject for his formal analysis, Schamberg transformed machines from objects of Dada irony and wit into objects of beauty” (Ibid.).