Untitled 1916

This untitled drawing by Morton Schamberg is a little puzzle made with charcoal on paper. You can see the energy of the marks, like he's feeling his way through the shapes. It’s all about process, about finding a form in the act of drawing itself. The charcoal gives it this great gritty texture, almost like you could reach out and smudge it. Look at how the light catches on those arches at the top, they are dark and heavy but they manage to feel like they are floating. There's a set of stairs twisting in the middle of the image that disappear into shadow. Schamberg was working at the same time as the cubists, and you can feel him wrestling with similar problems of how to represent three dimensions on a flat surface. It makes me think of the way Piranesi drew his impossible prisons, full of dark corners and hidden depths. It’s this kind of ambiguity that keeps art alive, you know?