Morris Kantor (1896-1974)

Adapting the Cubist principles of Marcel Duchamp's famed Nude Descending a Staircase (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), Morris Kantor's Orchestra superbly conjures in visual format the harmonious melding of various instruments into an overall melodic musical composition. The repetitive, angular planes of color advance and recede across the picture's surface, avoiding focus on an individual brass instrument or violin to rather create an overarching pattern of color and line.

Martica Sawin writes of the important innovation of this work and another of Kantor's early modern paintings: "Synthetic Arrangement [1922, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.] and Orchestra...represent the most authoritative American abstraction of this period, as well as the most extreme point to which Kantor carried his Cubist-inspired work. They are good examples, as well, of that historical process through which a young artist easily takes hold of the most radical residue of the preceding generation or decade and synthesizes it into something quite different from any of the components." (M. Sawin, "Morris Kantor: Early Paintings," Arts Magazine, February 1976, p. 88)