Untitled 1916

This drawing, by Morton Schamberg, is a small black and white study with a Cubist spin, somewhere between a machine and a still life. You can see Schamberg searching for a composition, using closely hatched pencil lines to define planes and shapes. There’s this great tension between the hard edges and the soft, smudgy areas. Look at the bottom, at the nervous, scribbled lines that almost dissolve into the paper. It’s like he’s mapping out the space, feeling his way through the forms. Then there’s the confident, bold outlines that cut through the composition. The stark contrast emphasizes the objectness of the objects and how they exist in space together. Schamberg was part of the same generation of artists as Duchamp, Picabia, and Man Ray. He was feeling his way through the same sets of ideas. Like his peers, he died young, but works like this one show us the dynamism of the moment. It's not about perfection, but about the energy of exploration.