Background
Schamberg was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, on October 15, 1881. He was the youngest child in the family. His father, Henry Schamberg, was a cattle dealer; his mother died when he was a child.
1700 W Olney Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19141, USA
Morton Schamberg completed his studies at Philadelphia's Central High School.
Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
In 1903 Morton Schamberg received a degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.
118-128 N Broad St, Philadelphia, PA 19102, USA
From 1903 till 1906 Schamberg studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Schamberg was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, on October 15, 1881. He was the youngest child in the family. His father, Henry Schamberg, was a cattle dealer; his mother died when he was a child.
Morton Schamberg completed his studies at Philadelphia's Central High School. In 1903 he received a degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. But in 1902 Schamberg became interested in art after he had attended a class taught by William Merritt Chase in the Netherlands. He took another lesson with the artist during the summer of 1903, in England. Schamberg then studied under his guidance for three years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. It was through Chase's classes that he met fellow student Charles Sheeler, a future American painter and commercial photographer, who would become his close friend.
Charles Sheeler and Morton Schamberg lived in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1906. There they painted pictures of fishing boats. Soon the two return to Philadelphia and shared a studio. The following year he travelled to Paris.
Schamberg spent a brief period of time in 1908 in Italy, accompanied by Sheeler. Together they visited museums in Rome, Florence, Siena, Milan and Venice and studied works of the Renaissance masters. In 1909 Schamberg left Charles Sheeler in Rome and made a trip to Tuscany and the Italian coast, travelled to Viareggio on the Italian Coast and began to paint small Cézannian landscapes with a bright palette.
Morton Schamberg moved on to Paris in 1909. In France, he became an associate of Leo and Gertrude Stein's circle of avant-garde artists and writers. Schamberg's earliest artworks were heavily influenced by William Merritt Chase. However, after studying the works of European artists in Paris, his style shifted to modernism, with influences from Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso evident in his artworks created between 1909 and 1912.
Schamberg returned to Philadelphia in mid-1909, and he and Sheeler again shared a studio in the same downtown building as before.
Morton Schamberg held his first individual art show in mid-1910, at the McClees Galleries in Philadelphia. The show comprised of his early landscapes and some of his larger scale portraits; they were mostly of his friend Fanette Reider and were created between 1908 and 1912. Around 1912, the artist began working as a photographer to make money. Initially, he was a portrait photographer, later switching to urban architecture. Morton Schamberg took part in the landmark 1913 Armory Show in New York, showing five of his modernist paintings.
By 1915, Schamberg began painting mechanical forms, perhaps, through the influence of such Dada artist like Marcel Duchamp. These late artworks ranged from precise illustrations to variants on Fauvist, Cubist, and Futurist styles. The only piece of art credited to Morton Schamberg that reflected a strong Dadaist sensibility was the assemblage "God". However, this attribution was questioned by art historians who believed he only photographed it, and that it was in fact created by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.
His distress over the First World War finally caused him to leave behind the subject of machines and to work in watercolours. An associate of art collector Walter Conrad Arensberg, Morton Schamberg exhibited his painting and drawing in the first show of Arensberg's Society of Independent Artists, which was organized in 1917.
Untitled (Landscape with Bridge)
Study of a Girl (Fanette Reider)
Figure
Machine Form
Painting VI
Painting IV (Mechanical Abstraction)
Untitled (Mechanical Abstraction)
View of Rooftops
Painting VII
View from the Side Boxes (Opera), Philadelphia
Rooftops
Figure A (Geometrical Patterns)
Telephone
God (in collaboration with Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven)
Painting (formerly Machine)
Painting VIII (Mechanical Abstraction)
Machine Composition
Untitled (Abstract Landscape with Structures)
Untitled
The Russian Ballet
Composition
Composition
Untitled
Painting VI (Camera flashlight, machine still life)
Still life
Dutchman with Pipe on Pier
Portrait of a Turbaned Man
Venus
Seascape
Landscape
Composition
Composition
Landscape
Morton Schamberg was a pacifist.
He viewed machines as an artistic inspiration yet a dehumanizing force.