Painting VI 1916

Morton Schamberg made this painting, Painting VI, with oil on canvas. You can see a muted palette, mostly grays, whites, and blues, with accents of red, yellow and black. The shapes are abstract, almost mechanical, but slightly off, which makes me think about how an artist like Schamberg is trying to resolve a puzzle. I imagine Schamberg carefully layering these forms, maybe building them up, scraping them away, trying to find some kind of dynamic equilibrium. He probably laid down the ground first. Then, perhaps that big white circle, like a wheel, a thought, or an idea, leading to a cascade of other forms—triangles, rods, smaller circles— tumbling beneath it. The paint isn't overly thick, but you can see the brushstrokes. It’s as though Schamberg is in conversation with other avant-garde painters like Picabia or Duchamp. He's clearly thinking through what it means to make a painting in the early 20th century. I like to think about how each generation of artists is always in dialogue with the ones before them, isn’t that true for all of us?