Morton L. Schamberg: God

God is a well-known assemblage from 1917 by Morton L. Schamberg, an artist who
is largely forgotten today and who died of the Spanish flu just about one year
after it was created, at the age of 37. The work itself probably only survived
because it somehow found its way into the famous collection of Louise and
Walter Arensberg and thus finally came into the possession of the Philadelphia
Museum of Art in 1954, where it was exhibited for the very first time that
same year. Schamberg's authorship of this unusual object, which consists of a
drain pipe screwed onto a miter box, was only questioned when the well-known
Dada scholar Francis M. Naumann suddenly speculated in 1994 in his book
classic New York Dada 1915–23 that this readymade, as Marcel Duchamp called
it, was more a work of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven than one of
Morton L. Schamberg. In doing so, he had brought a whole phalanx of feminist
forces to the scene, who also took his arguments as a starting point to deny
Marcel Duchamp the authorship of his most famous readymade Fountain by Richard
Mutt and at the same time tried with a great deal of imagination to ascribe
this to the Baroness as well. The present study now attempts to put the
authorship of God back into perspective with the help of new sources and to
explain why this is actually a work by Morton L. Schamberg.