In 1913, Morton Livingston Schamberg, then thirty-two years old, exhibited five paintings at the Armory Show. One, the ground-breaking Study of a Girl (Fanette Reider) (1912, Williams College Art Museum) illustrates his creative absorption of the intense color and forceful line of Henri Matisse and marked a radical transformation of figure painting in America. The other paintings (listed under such generic titles as “Figure” and “Landscape”) have not yet been associated with any works by Schamberg known today, but were probably less startling, judging from extant works he painted in 1911-12 (see, for example, Landscape, c. 1912; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Schamberg sold only one painting, for $100, during the run of the show, and was generally ignored by the press. [1] Nonetheless, his participation in the Armory Show marked a critical moment in his development. As the distinguished critic Hilton Kramer noted, “In the years 1913-1915 Schamberg’s art remained poised on the shifting frontiers of the new abstract art. . . [There was] a distinct acceleration in the scale of the artist’s ambition. The Armory Show seems to have renewed Schamberg’s confidence in his artistic mission, and it certainly encouraged a greater degree of audacity in his art.” [2]

Despite its modest scale, Untitled (Landscape Forms) is both ambitious and audacious. It is one of a series of landscape and figure studies Schamberg painted in 1913-14 that are important statements in the developing language of American abstraction. In these pictures he combines elements of Cubism with brilliant color—color taking a leading role in organizing forms in a non-illusionistic space. Most of these studies are on panel, measure about fourteen by ten inches, and are horizontal in orientation (Landscape (with House), 1913; Private collection). [3] Untitled, which is vertical, was probably subtitled “Landscape Forms” by Schamberg’s biographer, Ben Wolf. Wolf suggested that the image evokes a tree silhouetted against a blue sky, [4] though it can also be read as a standing figure, with columnar legs, a wasp waist, and upraised arms. This ambiguity is part of the painting’s magic: it was not meant to be descriptive but rather to stand on its own as an exhilarating pattern of shapes defined by a spectrum of rich, vibrant color. As Schamberg himself insisted, “The modern painter does not attempt to imitate nature. . . .Natural objects interest him, as an artist, only because of their visual qualities, which he so arranges as to express his sense of balance, rhythm, order, his most profound visual experience. . . .Painting is the orchestration of visual qualities.” [5]

Schamberg began with a warm-toned wooden panel, sketching in the outlines of some of his shapes with thick pencil or charcoal. He then added color, bringing the paint up to, but not covering, those linear boundaries. (Some of these seem to have been reinforced later.) Elsewhere, he suggested contours by leaving unpainted thin areas of the panel. The interplay between richly painted surface and visible ground flattens the space, while the color gradations marking some of the shapes cause them to be read as rounded, projecting, bathed in light. Graceful arcs, overlapping and rhyming, create a sensation of gentle motion. The rainbow hues, used arbitrarily, reflect Schamberg’s admiration for the intense, expressive palette of the work of Matisse and the French Fauves, whose work he had seen in Europe in 1909, as well as the lyrical color of the Orphists such as Robert Delaunay and their American counterparts on view at the Armory Show. The dynamism of this image, its combination of sensuous hues and crisp shapes, brings an innovative and sophisticated interpretation of chromatic abstraction to American art.

In Schamberg’s own work, the antecedents of Untitled can be found in paintings produced on his 1908-09 trip to Europe, made after three years of study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (prior to that he had earned a degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania). Based mostly in Paris, he traveled to Italy in 1909. While there, he painted several small works on panel, including Abstraction (c. 1909; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum), a landscape probably inspired by the beach at Viareggio in Tuscany. Abstraction shows a pileup of strongly colored, schematized landscape forms arrayed against a bright blue ocean and pale blue sky. This and other European works were featured in his first solo show, at the McClees Gallery in Philadelphia, in early 1910. He subsequently painted a number of landscapes on panel that, while relatively naturalistic, contain both the compositional elements and the freely brushed technique of his later, more abstract

Untitled is also closely linked to the work of Schamberg’s close friend Charles Sheeler. [6] The two artists worked in tandem for many years. They met as students at the Pennsylvania Academy, brought together by a drive for artistic innovation that was not satisfied by the rather retrograde styles and practices taught at the Academy. According to Constance Rourke, Sheeler’s biographer, “they felt themselves to be two against the world.” [7] Sheeler traveled with Schamberg in Europe. Upon their return they rented a studio on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia and also made frequent sketching excursions into nearby Bucks County. But while basing themselves in Philadelphia, they kept a close eye on the ideas coming out of advanced artistic circles in New York.

Sheeler’s landscapes from this period mirror Schamberg’s in many ways. His Abstraction, Tree Form (1914; Myron Kunin Collection of American Art) was painted on board in prismatic hues much like Schamberg was using at the time. Sheeler applied paint with thick, textured strokes as Schamberg did. He also used dark pencil outlines to contain a patchwork of shapes (while, again like Schamberg, he defined other contours by leaving slivers of the support unpainted); the result was an ambiguous, flattened space. At this point, Sheeler’s work was not as radically abstract as Schamberg’s, or as chromatically elegant. As he said of his friend, “Schamberg had luster. . . . Luster belonged to his mind and his work.” [8]

Schamberg died in the influenza epidemic of 1918; he was buried on what would have been his thirty-seventh birthday. The modernist art community was shocked by the loss of one of its most creative members. Sheeler described the death of his friend as “an overwhelming blow.” [9] In 1919, M. Knoedler and Co. organized a memorial exhibition, attracting the attention of a number of adventurous collectors and critics. [10] In an essay for The Dial, painter and art writer Walter Pach wrote that Schamberg’s work was marked by “a noble beauty.” Esteemed critic Henry McBride went further: “His color is ravishing and he had the most powerful instincts for design. . . .[The exhibition] is an honorable monument to modern art.” [11]

—Carol Troyen

[1] The only significant mention was a general comment from the forward-looking Charles Caffin, who wrote that Walt Kuhn, John Marin, Schamberg, Charles Sheeler, and Abraham Walkowitz were making an “individual effort to reason out the abstractions of form,” but he discussed none of their works. “The American Section Still Reflects the Naturalistic Motive,” New York American, March 10, 1913, quoted in Virginia M. Mecklenburg, “Slouching Toward Modernism: American Art at the Armory Show,” in Marilyn Satin Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt, eds., The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution (New York: New-York Historical Society Museum and Library, 2013), p. 244.

[2] Hilton Kramer, “The Morton Schamberg Retrospective,” The New Criterion 1, April 1983, p. 50.

[3] A small number of these abstractions, e.g., Landscape with Bridge (1914; Philadelphia Museum of Art) were painted on canvas and are somewhat larger—about 26 x 32 inches.

[4] “Tree and earth are mauve; sky areas are kept traditionally blue.” Ben Wolf, Morton Livingston Schamberg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), no. 28, p. 48.

[5] Schamberg, “Preface,” Philadelphia’s First Exhibition of Advanced Modern Art (Philadelphia: James McClees Gallery, 1916), n.p.

[6] In fact, Landscape was once attributed to Sheeler. A patron of both artists, Joan Detweiler, in 1962 gave the painting to the Corcoran Gallery of Art as a Sheeler. See Dorothy W. Phillips, A Catalogue of the Collection of American Paintings in The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Vol. 1: Painters born before 1850 (Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1966), p. 118. A recent catalogue of the Corcoran’s holdings corrects the attribution. See Sarah Cash, ed. Corcoran Gallery of Art: American Paintings to 1945 (Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 20110, p. 316. The Corcoran collection was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in 2015.

[7] Charles Sheeler, Artist in the American Tradition (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), p. 32.

[8] Rourke, p. 37.

[9] Charles Sheeler interview by Martin Friedman, June 18, 1959, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, tape 2, pp. 17-18.

[10]  For example, John Quinn acquired three major pictures from the Knoedler show, including Landscape (with House) (1914; Private collection) and Telephone (1916; Columbus Museum of Art), now regarded as an iconic precursor of machine-age modernism.

[11] Walter Pach, “The Schamberg Exhibition,” The Dial 66, May 17, 1919, p. 505; Henry McBride, “Posthumous Paintings by Schamberg,” New York Sun, May 25, 1919. Both quoted in Wolf, Schamberg, pp. 34-38.