Label Text:
Morton Schamberg’s Vase and Flowers features an arrangement of robust hollyhocks depicted in a blocky, semi-abstract style. Drawing on recent encounters with the art of Paul Cézanne and other Post-Impressionists in Paris, Schamberg sought to capture his own subjective response to his evocative natural subject rather than to replicate the plant’s literal appearance. Using a bold palette of red, blue, and green, the painter emphasized the hollyhocks’ sturdy physicality, for which the flower is renowned. Schamberg inventively enhanced the plant’s apparent strength by leaving outlines of unpainted canvas around many blooms. The artist’s attraction to hollyhocks as a subject may have been rooted in the flower’s associations with good health: many cultures have regarded hollyhocks as possessing curative powers. Such symbolism would have appealed to the often-sickly Schamberg, who died in the influenza epidemic of 1918.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+1968.16 |
