God

Gallery 282, Modern and Contemporary Art, second floor (d’Harnoncourt Gallery)

Main Building

God

c. 1917

Morton Livingston Schamberg (American, 1881–1918) , and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (German, 1874–1927)

In 1900 American writer Henry Adams contrasted the dynamo engine to the Virgin Mary as the icon of a new age, and in 1930 American poet Hart Crane would salute the Brooklyn Bridge as the altar of a new God. Consisting of an inverted household plumbing trap mounted on a wooden miter box, this construction offers a more tongue-in-cheek eulogy to the machine. Members of the New York Dadaists, Morton Schamberg and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven used irony and irreverence to topple artistic conventions. God shares a spiritual kinship with Marcel Duchamp’s notorious Fountain of 1917, a porcelain urinal turned on its side, and invokes Duchamp’s equivocal praise of plumbing and bridges as America’s greatest contributions to civilization.

Gallery 282, Modern and Contemporary Art, second floor (d’Harnoncourt Gallery)

Object Details

Titles:

God

Date:

c. 1917

Artists:

Morton Livingston Schamberg (American, 1881–1918) , and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (German, 1874–1927)

Medium:

Wood miter box; cast iron plumbing trap

Dimensions:

Height: 12 3/8 inches (31.4 cm) Base: 3 x 4 3/4 x 11 5/8 inches (7.6 x 12.1 x 29.5 cm)

Classification:

Sculpture

Credit Line:

The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950

Accession Number:

1950-134-182

Geography:

Made in New York, New York, United States, North and Central America

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Gallery 282, Modern and Contemporary Art, second floor (d’Harnoncourt Gallery)

Main Building

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