The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern ArtLEONARDO ROGER F MALINA, EXECUTIVE EDITOR SEAN CUBITT, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, Oliver Grau, 2003 Women, Art, and Technology. edited by Judy Malloy, 2003, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, Alexander R. Galloway, 2004 ‘Ata Distance: Precuriors o Art and Activism on the Internet, edited by Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark, 2005 The Visual Mind Il, edited by Michele Emmer, 2005 CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy edited by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, 2005 The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture, Eugene Thacker, 2005 Media Ecologies: Materialise Energies in Art and Technoculture, Mathew Fuller, 2005 New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, edited by Adalaide Mortis and Thomas Swiss, 2006 Aesthetic Computing, edited by Paul A. Fishwick, 2006 Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation, Steve Dixon, 2006 MediaArsHistories, edited by Oliver Grau, 2006 From Technological to Virtual Ars, Frank Popper, 2007 META/DATA: A Digital Poetics, Mark Ameri Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond, Eduardo Kac, 2007 The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science, Cr Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology, Susan Kozel, 2007 Video: The Reflexive Medium, Yvonne Spielmann, 2007 Sofiware Studies: A Lexicon, Matthew Fuller, 2008 Tactical Biopolities: Theory, Practice, and the Life Sciences, edited by Beattia da Costa and Kavita Philip, 2008 » 2007 van Campen, 2007 White Heat and Cold Logie: British Computer Art 1960 ~ 1980, edited by Paul Brown, Chai Nicholas Lambert, and Catherine Mason, 2008 (Gurating New Media Art, Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, 2010 Green Light: Notes Toward an Art of Evolution, George Gessert, 2010 Gere,Enfoldment and Infinity: An Llamic Genealogy of New Media Art, Laura U. Marks, 2010 Synthetics: Aspects of Ars & Technology in Australia, 1956-1975, Stephen Jones, 2011 Hybrid Culrures: Japanese Media Arts in Dialogue with the Wess, Yvonne Spielmann, 2012 Walking and Mapping: Arvsts as Cartographers, Karen O'Rourke, 2012 The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art Henderson, 2012 edition, Linda DalrympleThe Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art revised edition Linda Dalrymple Henderson The MIT Press ‘Cambridge, Massachusetts London, EnglandCover art Front: Cover design by Marcos Novak (Warp Map, 1998. Digital image courtesy of the artist.) Back: Fold-out frontispiece from Charles Howard Hinton, The Fourth Dimension, 2nd ed. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1906) © 2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology First edition published by Princeton University Press, 1983. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical ‘means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in ‘writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was sec in Univers and Garamond by the MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 1948- The fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometry in modern art / Linda Dalrymple Henderson. — Revised ion, p. em— (Leonardo book series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-58244-5 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Art, Modern—20th century—Themes, motives. 2. Fourth dimension. 3. Geometry in art. I. Title. NG490.H44 2013 701".8—de23 2012023825 0987654321for George, Andrew, and ElizabethContents List of Illustrations Series Foreword xxi Acknowledgments. xdii Reintroduction 1 ‘The View from the Twenty-First Century 1 ‘Augmenting a 1983 History of the Fourth Dimension in Cutture and Art (1900-1950) 15 X-Rays and Ether Physics as the Context for the “Fourth Dimension” 15 ‘Stuart Davis and Four-Dimensional Space-Time in the Era of Einstein 27 ‘The Fourth Dimension 1950-2000: An Overview 35 “Keepers of the Flame” of the Fourth Dimension: Laszié Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Duchamp, and Buckminster Fuller 35 Popular Literature on the Fourth Dimension in the 1950s-1960s, including the Writings of Martin Gardner 4% ‘American Artists’ Responses to the Spatial Fourth Dimension in the 1960s: Robert Smithson and the Park Place Gallery Group 56 Vehicles for the Spatial Fourth Dimension in the 1970s and 1980s: Expanded Cinema and New Media; Computer Graphics and String Theory 6 The 1970s through the 1990s: The Four-Dimensional Art of Tony Robbin 76 ‘Tho 1990s: From Hyperspace to Cyberspace and Marcos Novak's Digital Architecture; New Developments in String Theory 79CONTENTS: Concluding Thoughts #1 Introduction 37 The Nineteenth-Century Background 101 Non-Euclidean Geometry 101 ‘The Geometry of a Dimensions 105 ‘The Rise of Popular Interest in the New Geometries 111 Cubism and the New Geometries 16 Paris 1900-1912: The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Popular Literature 145 ‘The Visual Tradition of “The Fourth Dimension” 158 Chronology of Events 165 ‘The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Cubist Theory and Practice 176 ‘An Alternative View among the Cubists: The Theosophist Kupka 215 Boccioni’s Italian Futurist Critique of Cubism's Fourth Dimension 224 Marcel Duchamp and the New Geometries 233 Duchamp’s Introduction to -Dimensional and Non-Euclidean Geometry 237 The Large Glass 206 ‘The Notes in A l‘infinitif 252 Later Works 277 The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in America 29 Max Weber 231 Golett Burgess 311 Claude Bragdon 314CONTENTS xi New York 1913 and the Armory Show 312 Wartime New York: Duchamp and the Arensberg Circle 349 ‘The 1920s 361 5 Transcending the Present: The Fourth Dimension in the Philosophy of Ouspensky and in Russian Futurism and Suprematism 371 ‘The Secondary Role of Non-Euclidean Geometry and Relativity Theory Before the Revolution 374 Hyperspace Philosophy in Russie: Pater Demianovich Ouspensky 377 Early Russian Futurism and Larionov's Rayonism 386 ‘The Fourth Dimension in Russian Futurist Philosophy: Matyushin and Kruchenykh 395 ‘The Fourth Dimension in the Art of Malevich 43 ‘Tho 1920s: El Lissitzky and Others «27 6 The New Geometries during World War | and the Postwar Period in France and Holland: Reevaluation and Transformation ‘The Wartime Debate: Severini and Ozenfant «37 Early De ‘Tho Populerization of the Theory of Relativity in France 463 ‘Van Doesburg’s Pursuit of an Art for the World of Space-Time 467 ‘Art and Relativity in the 18208: An Overview 6 nd the Fourth Dimension 453 Conclusion «1 ‘The New Geometries in Art and Theory 1900-1930 431 ‘The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Art and Theory Since 1930 494 Appendix A: The Question of Cubism and Relativity 511 ‘Appendix B: American Articles Popularizing the New Geometries, 1877-1920 ssxii CONTENTS: Appendix C: Of the Book by Gleizes and Metzinger Du Cubisme sz Notes 537 Bibliography from the 1983 Edition es7 Index to the Reintroduction 2 Index to the 1983 Edition 703List of Illustrations Front cover: Cover design by Marcos Novak, Warp Map, 1998. (Digital image courtesy ofthe artist). Back cover: Fold-out frontispiece from Charles Howard Hinton, The Fourth Dimension, 2nd ed. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1906). R.1. Claude Bragdon, A Primer of Higher Space (The Fourth Dimension) (Rochester, NY: The Manas Press, 1913), PL. 1. R2. Bragdon, Primer of Higher Space, Pl. 8 R.3. M. Stevens, “The Fourth Dimension Bar and Grill,” Science 81 (October 1981). R.4, House of Gourelli “Fourth Dimension” perfume advertisement, Vogue, 126 (Nov. 1, 1955), 36. R55. “Photographic proof obtained by Dr. Voller of Hamburg,” in “La Découverte du Dr. Roentgen,” L'Mustration, Jan. 25, 1896, p. 73. RB. Bragdon, Primer of Higher Space, Pl. 19. R17. Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Danie!-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910, oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman in memory of Charles B. Goodspeed. (Photo: Art Institute of Chicago) ©2012 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. RB, Umberto Boccioni, Matter, 1912, oil on canvas. Gianni Mattioli Collection, Milan; long-term loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. (Photo: Luca Carra, Milan). RY. Stuart Davis, Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors—7th Avenue Style, 1940, oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of the William H. Lane Foundation and the M. and M. Karolik Collection, by exchange. (Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), Licensed by VAGA, New York. R.10. Stuart Davis, Daybook drawing, 1932 From Stuart Davis, ed. Diane Kelder (Now York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), p. 55. R.11. “Diagram to illustrate the motion of a train in space and time,” in James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1931), p. 108. R12. Lészié Moholy-Nagy, Light Prop for an Electric Stage [Light-Space Modulator}, 1922-30, kinetic sculpture of steel, plastic, wood, and other materials, electric motor. Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, gift of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. (Photo: Busch-Reisinger Museum) © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. R.13, Le Mouvement exhibition, Galerie Denise René, Paris, April 1956, From Le Mouvement/The Movement Paris 1955(New York: Editions Denise René, 1975), p. 9. © Galerie Denise René, Paris.xiv UST OF ILLUSTRATIONS R.14. Marcel Duchamp, Note from A /‘infinitif{ The White Box (New York: Cordier & Ekstrom, 1966). R15, Boris Artzybasheff, A. Buckminster Fuller, 1963, tempera on board (cover of Time, Jan. 10, 1964). National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of Time magazin R.16, Buckminster Fuller, “Energetic and Synergetic Geometry,” 1944. Reproduced in John McHale, A. Buckminster Fuller (New York: George Braziller, 1962), Fig. 36. Reprinted with the permission of George Braziller, Inc. and courtesy of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University. R.17. Martin Goldstein, Dust jacket design for Martin Gardner, The Ambidextrous Universe: Left, Right, and the Fall of Parity (New York: Basic Books, 1964). R18. M.C. Escher, Circle Limit |, 1958, woodcut. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Cornelius Van S. Roosevelt Collection. © Cordon Art B.V., Baarn, Holland. (Photo: © 2012 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art) R19. M. C. Escher, Belvedere, 1958, lithograph. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Rosenwald Collection. © Cordon Art B.V., Barn, Holland. (Photo: © 2012 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art). R20. Robert Smithson, Four-Sided Vortex, 1965, stainless steel and mirror. Estate of Robert Smithson, courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, New York. © Estate of Robert Smithson / Licensed by VAGA, New York. Atlanta Gateway, 1966, stee! pipe, Atlanta Gateway Park, Atlanta, GA. (Photo by Angus Wynn, courtesy of the artist). R22. Dean Fleming, Snap Roll, 1965, acrylic on canvas. Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of ‘Texas at Austin, Gift of Mari and James A. Michener. (Photo: Blanton Museum of Art), R.23. Tony Robbin, Fourfield, 1980-81, acrylic on canvas with welded steel rods. (Photo: Tony Robbin). R.24, Marcos Novak, Warp Map, 1998. (Digital image courtesy of the artist). 1.1. Beltrami’s Pseudosphere for the Lobachevsky-Bolyai Geometry. Lines M and N through point P approach line |, but will never intersect it. ABC + 4BCA + 4.CAB < 180°. 1.2. Riemannian Geometry Represented on a Sphere. Lines such as |, M, and N will always meet. YABC + ¢BCA + ¢CAB > 180°. 1.3. W. |. Stringham, “Regular Figures in n-Dimensional Space,” American Journal of Mathematics, ii (1880), Phi. 1.4. W.L. Stringham, “Regular Figures in n-Dimensional Space,” American Journal of Mathematics, Phi 1.5. “Eight Cubes Which Can Be Folded So As to Form a Hypercube,” from H. P. Manning, Geometry of Four Dimensions, New York, 1914, p. 240. 1.6. Three-Dimensional Perspective Projection of the Hypercube, from H. P. Manning, Geometry of Four Dimensions, p. 240. 1.7. Frontispiece (originally in color) from Charles Howard Hinton, The Fourth Dimension, London and New York, 1904. 2.1. Comendia, Paris, 20 Mar. 1912, p.1. 2.2. “Plane Projections of the Sixteen Fundamental Octahedrons of an Ikosatetrahedroid,” from E. Jouttret, Traité élémentaire de géométrie 4 quatre dimensions, Paris, 1903, Fig. 3.8. 1880),LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. wv 2.3. “Perspective cavaliére of the Sixteen Fundamental Octahedrons of an Ikosatetrahedroid,” from E Jouttret, Traité élémentaire, Fig. 39. 2.4, Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Ambroise Vollard, 1910, oil on canvas, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (Photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York]. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 2.8. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, Tha Museum of Modern Art, New York, Acquired through the Lilia P. Bliss Bequest (Photo: The Museum of Modern Art. © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Sociaty (ARS), New York. 2.6. Georges Braque, Houses at LEstaque, 1908, oil on canvas, Kunstmuseum, Berne, Rupf Foundation (Photo: Kunstmuseum, Berne). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris. 2.7. Pablo Picasso, Seated Nude, 1903-1910, oil on canvas, The Tate Gallery, London (Photo: The Tate Gallery). © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 2.8. Georges Braque, The Clarinet (Stil Life with Tenora], 1913, pasted paper, charcoal, chalk and oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Nelson A. Rockefeller Bequest (Photo: The Museum of Modern Art). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris. 2.9. Jean Metzinger, Nude, 1910, ol on canvas, present location unknown. 2.10. Pablo Picasso, Man with Violin, 1911-1912, oil on cenvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art (Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Ant).© 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 2.11. Jean Metzinger, Le Godter, 1911, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art (Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, 2.12. Albert Gleizes, Woman with the Phiox, 1910, oil on canvas, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Gift of the Goodrich Foundation (Photo: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston). 2.13. Henri Le Fauconnier, Abundance, 1810-1911, oil on canvas, Gemeente Museum, The Hague (Photo: Gemeente Museum). 2.14, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, facade of the “Maison Cubiste” exhibited at the Salon d’Automne of 1912, from L’Art Decoratit Feb. 1913, p. 69. 2.15. Jean Metzinger, The Blue Bird, 1913, oil on canvas, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (Photo: J. E, Bulloz, Paris). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. 2.16. Juan Gris, The Man in the Cafe, 1912, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Loui Arensberg Collection (Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art) 2.17. Juan Gris, Guiter and Flowers, 1912, oil on canves, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Bequest of Anna Erickson Levene in Memory of Her Husband, Or. Phoebus Aaron Levene (Photo: The Museum of Modern Art. 2.18. Juan Gris, Landscape at Céret, 1913, oil on canvas, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (Photo: Moderna Museet) 2.19, Juan Gris, The Teacups, 1914, ci, charcoal, and pasted paper on canvas, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein- Westfalen, Diisseldor (Photo: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen). 2.20, Jean Metzinger, Cubist Landscape, 1911, oil on canvas, Private Collection, Paris (Photo: Sidney Janis, Gallery). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris, ind Walterxvi UIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 221. Frantiéek Kupka, Planes by Colors, 1911-1912, oil on canvas, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (Photo: CNAC/MNAM/Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/ Art Resource, NY) © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. 2.22. Frantigek Kupke, untitled drawing, ca. 1910, graphite pencil on paper, Private Collection, Paris (Photo: Galerie Karl Flinker). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. 2.23, Frantigek Kupka, Organization of Graphic Motifs |, 1912-1913, oil on canvas, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano (Photo: Royal S. Marks Gallery). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. 2.24. Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913, bronze, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Acquired through the Lilie P. Bliss Bequest (Photo: The Museum of Modern Art) 225. Intersection of a spiral and 8 plane, from Hinton, The Fourth Dimension (1904), p. 25. 3.1. Marcel Duchamp, Study for “Portrait of Chess Players,” 1911, ink and watercolor on paper, The Solomon R, Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift of Katherine S. Dreier Estate (Photo: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) 32. Marcel Duchamp, Portrait of Chess Players, 1911, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Musoum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection (Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art) © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp. 33. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection (Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art) © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp. 34, Marcel Duchamp, The Bride, 1912, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection (Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art) © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp. 35. Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 1915-1923, cil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on glass panels encased in glass, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bequest of Katherine S. Dreier (Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art) © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp. 36. Marcel Duchamp, Three Standard Stoppages, 1913-1914, three threads glued to three painted canvas, strips, each mounted on a glass panel, and three wooden slats, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Katherine S. Dreier Bequest (Photo: The Museum of Modern Art) © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp. 3.7. Frontispiece from Fr. Jean-Frangois Niceron, Thaumaturgus Opticus, Paris, 1648. 3.8. “Tab. 13,” from Niceron, Thaumaturgus Opticus. 39. “Tracing on Glass, After Nature,” from Frédéric Goupil, La Perspective expérimentale, artistique, méthodique et attrayante ou lorthographie des formes (1860), Paris, 1883, p. 16. 3.10. Marcel Duchamp, Glider Containing a Water Mill in Neighboring Metals, 1913-1915, oil and lead wire ‘on glass, mounted between two glass plates, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection (Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art) © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel! Duchamp.LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xvii 3.11. Marcel Duchamp, Tu m, 1918, oil and pencil on canvas, with bottle brush, bolt, and three safety pins, Yale University Art Gallery (Photo: Vale University Art Gallery] © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp. 3.12. Marcel Duchamp, “Handler of Gravity,” from the Green Box [La Mariée mise 4 nu par ses célibataires, ‘mémel, Paris, 1934 3.13. Marcel Duchamp, To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour, 191 3nd magnifying lens on glass, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Katherine S. Dreier Bequest (Photo: The Museum of Modern Art) © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp. 3.14, “The First Hexadekahedroid,” from E. Jouffret, Mélanges de géométrie & quatre dimensions, Paris, 1906, Fig. 22. 3.15. Marcel Duchamp, Unhappy Readymade, 1919, original destroyed. 3.16. Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Rotary Glass Plates (Precision Optics), 1920, five painted glass plates, wood and metal braces, turning on a metal axis, electrically operated, Yale University Art Gallery, Collection of the Société Anonyme (Photo: Yale University Art Gallery] © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp; © 2012 Man Ray TrusvARS, NY/ADAGP, Paris. 3.17. Marcel Duchamp, Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics), 1925, painted wood demisphere, fitted on black velvet disk, copper collar with plexiglass dome, motor, pulley, and metal stand, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. William Sisler and Edward James Fund (Photo: The Museum of Modern Art) © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp. 4.1, Max Weber, Composition with Three Figures, 1910, gouache on corrugated board, The Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ackland Fund (Photo: The Ackland Art Museum). 4.2. Max Weber, Three Witches, 1911, oil on canvas, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (Photo: Beinecke Library). 4.3, Max Weber, The Geranium, 1911, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Acquired through the Lillia P. Bliss Bequest (Photo: The Museum of Modern Art). 4.4, Max Weber, Study for “Interior of he Fourth Dimension,” 1913, gouache on paper, Baltimore Museum of ‘Art (Photo: Baltimore Museum of Art) 4.5. Max Weber, Interior of the Fourth Dimension, 1913, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Gift of Natalie D. Spingarn in Memory of Linda R. Miller (Photo: National Gallery of Art) 4.8. Max Weber, Rush Hour, New York, 1915, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 0.C. (Photo: National Gallery of Art) 4.7. Bayard Jones, cartoon from Harper's Weekly, 10 May 1913, p. 43. 4.8, Gelett Burgess, Frontispiece from The Burgess Nonsense Book, New York, 1901. 4.9. Claude Bragdon, “Personalities: Tracings of the Individual (Cube) in a Plane,” from Man the Square: A Higher Space Parable, Rochester, N.Y, 1912, p. 65. 4.10. Claude Bragdon, “The Projections Made by a Cube in Traversing a Plane,” from A Primer of Higher Space, Rochester, N.Y., 1913, Pl. 30. 4.11. Claude Bragdon, page 29 from Projective Ornament, Rochester, N.Y., 1915.xviii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 4.12. Claude Bragdon, plate facing page 22 of Projective Ornament. 4.13. Claude Bragdon, plate facing page 9 of Projective Ornament. 4.14, Claude Bragdon, Song and Light in Central Park, New York, 1916, from Theatre Arts Magazine, Aug. 1917, p. 188. 4.15. Marcel Duchamp, poster for the French Chess Championshig , 1925, lithograph, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Photo: The Museum of Modern Art) © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp. 4.16. Francis Picabia, New York, 1913, watercolor on paper mounted on board, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection (Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. 4.17. Marius de Zayas, Theodore Roosevel, 1913, from Camera Work, no. 46 (Apr. 1914), p. 43. 4.18. Marius de Zayas and Agnes Ernst Meyer, Mental Reactions, 1915, from 291, no. 2 (Apr. 1915), p. 3. 4.19. John Covert, Time, 1919, oil and upholstery tacks on composition board, Yale University Art Gallery, Collection of the Société Anonyme (Photo: Yale University Art Gallery). 4.20. Jean Crotti, Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1915, pencil on paper, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Photo: The Museum of Modern Art). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. 421, Francis Bruguidre, “Thomas Wilfred’s Color Organ: Progressive Stages in a Movement,” from Stark Young, “The Color Orgen,” Theatre Arts Magazine, Jan. 1922, p. 24 4.22. R. Buckminster Fuller, “Typical 4D Interior Solution Sketch,” from 4D Time Lock, Chicago, 1928 (Photo: Buckminster Full 4.23. R. Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion House, 1990 (Photo: Buckminster Fuller). 5.1. 0.10 Last Futurist Exhibition, Dec. 1915—Jan. 1916, contemporary photograph of Malevich's section of the installation, Private Collection, Leningrad. 5.2. “Futurist Exhibition: 0.10,” contemporary photograph from unidentified periodical. 5.3. Mikhail Larionov, Portrait of @ Fool, 1912, oil on canvas, Private Collection, Moscow (Photo: Leonard Hutton Galleries). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Pari 5.4. Mikhail Larionov, Street Lighting, 1913, oil on board, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. George R. Brown (Photo: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. 55. Kezimir Malevich, The Knife Grinder, 1912, oil on canvas, Yale University Art Gallery (Photo: Yale University Art Gallery). 5.6. Kazimir Malevich, Samovar, 1913, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, The Riklis Collection of McCrary Corporation, New York (Photo: The McCrory Corporation). 5.7. Kazimir Malevich, drawing for Troe (The Three) St. Petersburg, 1913, p. 51. 5.8. Kazimir Malevich, An Englishman in Moscow, 1913-1914, oil on canvas, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (Photo: Stedelijk Museum). 5.9. Kazimir Malevich, set design for Act 2 of Victory over the Sun, 1913, State Theatrical Museum, Leningrad. 5.10. Kazimir Malevich, set design for Scene 1, Acts 1 and 2, of Victory over the Sun, 1913, State Theatrical ‘Museum, Leningrad.LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xix 5.11. Kazimir Malevich, Woman at Poster Column, 1914, oil on canvas, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (Photo: Stedelijk Museum), 5.12, Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting: Eight Red Rectangles, 1915, oil on canvas, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (Photo: Stedelijk Museum). 5.13. Kezimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting: Black Trapezium and Red Square, 1915, oil on canvas, Ste Museum, Amsterdam (Photo: Stedelijk Museum). 5.14, El Lissitzky, Proun 307, 1920, oil on canvas, Kunstmuseum Hannover mit Sammlung Sprengel (Photo: Kunstmuseum Hannover). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 5.15. El Lissitzky, “Proun Room,” 1923, lithograph from Proun Portfolio, 1923, Dallas Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts Collection, Gift of Mrs. James H. Clark, Dallas (Photo: Dallas Museum of Fine Arts). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 6.1. Pablo Picasso, Stil Life with Fruit Bowl, 1915, oil on canvas, Columbus Museum of Art, Gift of Ferdinand Howald (Photo: Columbus Museum of Art), © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 6.2. Jean Metzinger, Still Life with Lamp, 1916, oil on canvas mounted on composition board, The Museum ‘of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Lewis Winston (Photo: The Museum of Modern Art). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. 6.3. Gino Severini, Still Life: Quaker Oats, 1917, oil on canvas, Estorick Foundation, London (Photo: Grosvenor Gallery, London). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. 6.4. Diego Rivera, Portrait of Maximilian Voloshin, 1916, oil on canvas, Carrillo Gil Museum, Mexico City (Photo: Carrillo Gil Museum). © 2012 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México, D.F Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 65. Juan Gris, Suill Life, 1917, oil on wood panel, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Photo: The Minneapolis, Institute of Arts). 6.6. Amédée Ozenfant, Sti Life, 1920, oil on canvas, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (Photo: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). 6.7. Diego Rivera, The Painter in Repose, 1916, arrillo Gil Museum, Mexico City (Photo: Car Gil Museum). © 2012 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, México, D-F/Artists Rights ‘Society (ARS), New York. 6.8. Theo van Doesburg, Composition IX: The Card Players, 1917, oil on canvas, Gemeente Museum, The Hague (Photo: Gemeente Museum). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /Beeldrecht, Amsterdam. 6.9, Theo van Doesburg, Composition XIII, Variation, 1918, oil on panel, The Cincinnati Art Museum, Bequest ‘of Mary E. Johnston (Photo: The Cincinnati Art Museum). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Beeldrecht, Amsterdam. 6.10. Piet Mondrian, Composition with Color Planes on White Ground, A, 1917, oil on canvas, Kréller- Miller Museum, Otterlo (Photo: Kréller-Miller Museum). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Beeldrecht, Amsterdam. 6.11. Piet Mondrian, Composition in Grey and Light Brown, ca. 1918, oil on canvas, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Pierre Schlumberger (Photo: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Beeldrecht, Amsterdam.x UST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 6.12. Theo van Doesburg, Composition in Discords, 1918, oil on canvas, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Gift of Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach (Photo: Kunstmuseum, Basel). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Beeldrecht, Amsterdam. 6.13, Advertisement published in L Esprit Nouveau, no. 16 (Mar. 1922), p. 1961. 6.14, De Stil Exhibition, Galerie de ‘Effort Moderne, Paris, 1923, from De Sti, vi/6-7 (1924). 6.15, Theo van Doesburg, illustration of the cube and hypercube, from Van Doesburg, “L’Evolution da architecture moderne en Hollande,” L’Architecture Vivante, 1925, p. 18. 6.16. Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren, project for a private house, 1923, from Van Doesburg, “LEvolution de architecture moderne en Hollande,” L’Architecture Vivante, 1925, p. 19. 6.17. Theo van Doesburg, Color Construction in the Fourth Dimension of Space-Time, 1924, gouache on tracing paper, Stedelik Museum, Amsterdam (Photo: Stedelik Museum). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Beeldrecht, Amsterdam. 6.18. Cover of De Stijl, v/6 (June 1922), illustrating El Lissitzky’s Proun 1C of 1919. 6.19. Theo van Doesburg, Counter-Composition with Dissonant XVI, 1925, oil on canvas, Gemeente Museum, The Hague (Photo: Gemeente Museum). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Beeldrecht, ‘Amsterdam. 6.20, Theo van Doesburg, “A New Dimension Penetrates Our Scientific and Plastic Consciousness,” from De Sti, vii[79-84 (1927), pp. 21-22. 6.21. Atelier Van Doesburg, “From Surface to Space: Six Moments of a Space-Time Construction (with 24 Variations), Formation of a Diagonal Dimension,” 1926, from Die Form, iv (15 May 1929). 6.22. Theo van Doesburg, “Schematic Representation of a Three-Dimensional Space, Simultaneously Agitated in All Directions,” from Die Form, iv (15 May 1828). 7.1. 1, Rice Pereira, Oblique Progression, 1948, oil on canvas, Whitney Museum of American Art (Photo: Whitney Museum). 7.2. Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory, 1931, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Photo: The Museum of Modern Art). © 2011 Kingdom of Spain, Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 7.3. Oscar Dominguez, Nostalgia of Space, 1939, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Peggy Guggenheim (Photo: The Museum of Modern Art). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. 7.4. Matta Echaurren, The Vertigo of Eros, 1944, oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (Photo: ‘The Museum of Modern Art). © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. 7.8, Salvador Dali, Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus), 1954, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Chester Dale Collection (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art). © 2011 Kingdom of Spain, Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 7.6. Thomas Banchoff and Charles Strauss, computer simulation of a rotating four-dimensional hypercube, photographed at the Brown University Graphics Laboratory (Photo: Brown University News Bureau). 7.1. Tony Robbin, 79-8, 1979, Collection of the artist (Photo: Tony Robbin).Series Foreword Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, and the affiliated French organization Association Leonardo have some very simple goals: 1. To document and make known the work of artists, researchers, and scholars interested in the ways that the contemporary arts interact with science and technology and 2. To create a forum and meeting places where artists, scientists, and engineers can meet, exchange ideas, and, where appropriate, collaborate. 3. To contribute, through the interaction of the arts and sciences, to the creation of the new culture that will be needed to transition to a sustainable planetary society ‘When the journal Leonardo was started some forty years ago, these creative disciplines existed in segregated institutional and social networks, a situation dramatized at that time by the “Two Cultures” debates initiated by C. P. Snow. Today we live in a different time of cross-disciplinary ferment, collaboration, and intellectual confrontation enabled by new hybrid organizations, new funding sponsors, and the shared tools of computers and the Internet. Above all, new generations of artist-researchers and researcher-artists are now at work individually and in collaborative teams bridging the art, science, and technology disciplines. For some of the hard problems in our society, we have no choice but to find new ways to couple the arts and sciences. Perhaps in our lifetime we will see the emergence of “new Leonardos,” creative individuals or teams that will not only develop a meaningful art for our times but also drive new agendas in science and stimulate technological innovation that addresses today’s human needs.xxii ‘SERIES FOREWORD For more information on the activities of the Leonardo organizations and networks, please visit our Web sites at and . Roger F. Malina Executive Editor, Leonardo Publications ISAST Governing Board of Directors: Jeffrey Babcock, Nina Czegledy, Greg Harper (Chait), Gordon Knox, Melinda Klayman, Roger Malina, Meredith Trom- ble, Tami Spector, Darlene Tong.Acknowledgments ‘The Reintroduction here draws upon research done over the last decade as part of work on a larger sequel to the original volume that is reprinted here. I thus owe debts of gratitude to colleagues in a wide variety of fields, who have offered infor- mation and support during the course of my voyage of discovery as I tracked the fourth dimension through the entire century. Here, however, I hope to name most of those who had an impact in one way or another on what appears in this Reintroduction. First of all, I must thank the Internationales Kolleg fiir Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie at the Bauhaus University, Weimar, Germany, and its co-Directors—Bernhard Siegert and Lorenz Engell—whose Senior Fellowship provided the setting for my continued research and writing of the Reintroduction during late spring/summer terms 2010 and 2011. The stimulation of colleagues at the IKKM, including Volker Pantenburg, as well other scholars in Getmany—Lars Blunck, Wolfgang Hagen, Joachim Krausse, Elmar Schenkel, Dirk Vanderbeke, Margarete Vohringer, Christoph Wagner, and Isabel Wiinsche—contributed importantly to my project. Closer to home, at the University of Texas at Austin, the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professorship in Are History provided crucial research and travel support for this project throughout the past decade. In addition, faculty, students, and staff at the University of Texas have made a variety of contributions to this work, for which I am very grateful. Among these individuals are colleagues in my own department—John Clarke, Bogdan Perzynski, Ann Reynolds, Richard Shiff and former colleague Brenda Preyer—as well as current and former colleagues across campus, including Bruce Hunt, the late Ilya Prigogine, the late John Wheeler, and J. Craig Wheeler. Library and Visual Resources staff members also deserve my deepest thanks: Laura Schwartz, Sigrid Knudsen, Sydney Kilgore, and,xxiv ‘ACKNOWLEDGMENTS especially, Mark Doroba. As seminar students, advisees, and research assistants, a number of current and recently graduated University of Texas master’s and doctoral students have assisted this project in a variety of ways, including Lynn Boland, Valerie Hellstein, Chelsea Jones, Peter Mowris, Susanna Reynolds, Laura Valeri, Ashley Schmiedekamp, Melissa Warak, and Chelsea Weathers, I have also benefitted greatly from conversations with former UT graduate students who are now professional colleagues: Catherine Craft, Christina Cogdell, Erina Duganne, Anne Collins Goodyear, the late Justine Price, Stephen Petersen, Reiko Tomii, and Jennifer Way. Scholars Bruce Clarke and Peter Jelavich kindly read sections of the manuscript as it developed, and, as always, I owe a debt to them for their insights. Artists and other individuals who figure in this study generously provided information and feedback, including Thomas Banchoff, Marcos Novak, Tony Robbin, and Gene Youngblood, as well as Peter Hutchinson, Paul Laffoley, the late Gordon Onslow Ford, and the late Heinz von Foerster. Artists of the Park Place Gallery group of the 1960s were instrumental in opening up the history of the fourth dimension in that era, and I am forever grateful to Dean Fleming, the late Peter Forakis, and Edwin Ruda, as well as to Mark di Suvero, Tamara Melcher, Frosty Myers, David Novros, and Mary Valledor, widow of Leo Valledor, for our discussions. From the realms of art and new media, art history, literature, mathematics, and science, I offer sincere thanks to each of the following: William Agee, Rhea Anastas, Mark Antliff, Oliver Botar, Fae Brauer, Guy Brett, Scott Carter, Charlotte Douglas, Larisa Dryansky, Bruce Elder, Eugenia Ellis, Michele Emmer, Don Foresta, Paul Frankdin, Tom Gibbons, Adrian Hicken, Paul Halpern, Robert Herbert, James Housefield, Elliott King, Haresh Lalvani, Patricia Leighten, William Lindgren, Jonathan Massey, James McManus, Jacqueline Matisse Monnier, Sean Miller, Joe Milutis, Iwan Rhys Morus, Francis Naumann, Peter Nisbet, Gerry O’Grady, Gavin Parkinson, Sidney Perkowitz, Jasia Reichardt, Andrea Reithmayr, Jennifer Roberts, Pascal Rousseau, Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, Edward Shanken, Athena Tacha, Michael Taylor, the late Donald Theall, and Ghislain Thibault. At MIT Press my editor Douglas Sery waited patiently for this text as it evolved, and Katie Helke Dokshina and Michael Sims steered it through the publication process. Leonardo Book Series editor Roger Malina offered important insights and‘ACKNOWLEDGMENTS od encouragement along the way. I am very grateful to designer Yasuyo Iguchi and, especially, to Marcos Novak for his superb cover. Finally, and most importantly, this project would never have come to fruition without the longstanding support of my husband George, who has lived with [or in) the fourth dimension for decades and has always stood by to edit, proofread, or do whatever was required to move things forward. That love and support, along with that of our now-grown children, Andrew and Elizabeth, and various other family members, has made this work possible. I dedicate this new edition to them. Acknowledgments (1983 edition) ‘This study of “the fourth dimension” and non-Euclidean geometry would never have been made if Robert Herbert had not directed my attention to the problem during a Yale graduate seminar on Art, Science, and Technology in 1970. At every stage of my work on this subject, from seminar paper to dissertation and beyond, he has been a wise and willing counselor. His own scholarship as an art historian continues to serve as my inspiration and model. Several other scholars have also been involved with this project for nearly a decade. I wish to express sincerest appreciation to Anne Coffin Hanson (Yale University), William Camfield (Rice University), John Bowlt (The University of Texas at Austin), and Charlotte Douglas (New York). Each of these individuals has nurtured my project by sharing materials and ideas over the years. Because of the breadth of this study I am also indebted to a large number of scholars and artists who have generously contributed vital information to my study. To each of the following, thank you: Aasger Aaboe, Craig Adcock, William Agee, Troels Andersen, Eleanor Apter, Joost Baljeu, Marvin Ballard, Thomas Banchoff, Alan Birnholz, Sally Bodine, Donald Bush, Daniel Cameron, the late Sheldon Cheney, Herschel Chipp, Jean Clair, Susan Compton, Gladys Fabre, Edward Fry, Buckminster Fuller, Donald Gordon, Anne d’Harnoncourt, William Homer, K. G. Pontus Hultén, Gyorgy Kepes, Martin Klein, Gail Levin, Albert Lewis, Kenneth Lindsay, Rose-Carol Washton Long, Marianne Martin, Frances Naumann, Peter Nisbet, Percy North, Robert Palter, John Adkins Richardson, Tony Robbin, Daniel Robbins, Margit Rowell, Arturo Schwarz, Héléne and Josué Seckel, Roberta Tarbell, Andrew Weininger, Robert Williams, and Judith Zilczer.xvi ‘ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My research was frequently facilitated by relatives and friends of the artists, writers, and other partisans of the new geometries who are the subject of this book. For their interviews or written responses I wish to thank: Mme. Gabrielle Buffet- Picabia, the late Sonia Delaunay, Mme. Alice Derain, Mme. Anne-Francoise Mare- Véne, Mme. Suzanne Metzinger, M. Michel Kaplan (once an apprentice to book publisher Jacques Povolozky), and the three individuals who brought to light information about Maurice Prince-—Mme. Marie-Ancoinerte du Latlay, M. Marcel Henry of the Institut des Actuaires Francais, and M. Yves Lessard of La Paix Vie, Paris. In addition, Mrs. Edith Lutyens Bel Geddes, Mrs. Henry W. Bragdon, Mr. John T. Cheney, and Miss Joy Weber generously provided information or made archival materials available for publication. I am grateful for the assistance of the personnel at the following libraries and archives: The Archives of American Art; Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (David Schoonover, Curator, and Donald Gallup, retired Curator); Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin (Carlton Lake, Curator; Sally Leach and Ellen Dunlap, librarians); The University of Rochester Library, Department of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Archives (Alma Burner Creek, librarian of the Bragdon Family Papers); The Francis Bacon Library, Claremont, California (Elizabeth S. Wrigley, Director). In addition, the Interlibrary Loan’ Services of the libraries of Rice University, and The University of Texas at Austin provided invaluable services, as did Linda Shearouse, librarian of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. ‘A number of collectors and galleries were also most helpful in making available photographs or information: Celia Ascher of The McCrory Corporation Collection, Ame Ekstrom of Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery, Galerie Karl Flinker, Leonard Hutton Gallery, Royal S. Marks Gallery, as well as Mrs. James H. Clark, Dallas, and Natalie D, Spingarn, Washington, D.C. At the Museum of Modern Art, both Richard Tooke and Thomas Grischkowsky have consistently provided courteous help with photograph orders. ‘The purchase of photographs as well as the last stages of my research were funded by a Research Grant and three Special Research Grants from the University Research Institute, The University of Texas at Austin. I am grateful also for the support of my colleagues in the Department of Art at the University of Texas, as well as my students, Among these students whose own areas of research have provedACKNOWLEDGMENTS, xxvii particularly helpful to my own were Myroslava Ciszkewycz, Ramén Favela, Annegreth Nill, Susan Noyes Platt, and John Carlos Cantii, who also performed helpful editing duties. Jean McAmbley O’Carroll aided in the refining of my translation of Matyushin’s text in Appendix C, and Mrs. Ona Kay Stephenson typed the manuscript with a level of care and commitment that is much appreciated. At Princeton University Press, Christine Ivusic and Robert Brown were the sensitive and supportive editors who shepherded my text from typescript to its published form. Finally, my husband and son deserve a special expression of gratitude. Only theit patience, encouragement, and help at every stage of my project have made this long-term endeavor possible. That patience is particularly appreciated from a four- year-old boy who has recently begun to ask if the mothers of all little boys are writing books.Reintroduction The View from the Twenty-First Century Tt has been nearly thirty years since this book first appeared in 1983, having been written initially as a dissertation in 1975. Much has changed since that moment in the 1970s, when popular perception of the term fourth dimension was still domi- nated by Hermann Minkowski’s definition of it as time in the space-time contin- uum of Einsteinian Relativity Theory.' Since the 1980s, with the emergence of new theories in physics, such as string theory, that feature ten ot cleven-dimen- sional universes—as well as the advent of computers and graphics programs capable of displaying and manipulating higher dimensional objects—the spatial, geometri- cal interpretation of the expression fourth dimension once again petmeates popular culture. An advanced Google search for the terms “fourth dimension” space in Octo- ber 2012, for example, produced 923,000 results, a volume of information that stands as the early twenty-first century, information-age counterpart to the flood of popular printed literature on the possible existence of a fourth dimension of space a hundred years ago.? As this study establishes, public fascination with a spatial fourth dimension was displaced only with the popularization of Einstein and Relativity Theory after 1919 and the gradual transformation of the concept’s signification from space to time.? Indeed, before the 1920s (and even beyond in some cases), artists in a wide variety of modern movements had responded to this highly suggestive idea. Although there was a small-scale renewal of interest in a fourth dimension of space in the later 1950s and 1960s (which proved important for a number of artists, as discussed in this Reintroduction), interest in higher dimensions of space did not return in force to cultural prominence until the last decades of the twentieth century.2 REINTRODUCTION ‘The major impact of the spatial fourth dimension on early twentieth-century art was far from clear in February 1970 when, as a Yale graduate student in a seminar on “Art, Science, and Technology in the 19th and 20th Centuries,” I chose a research project titled “Science and Scientific Metaphors in Artists’ and Critics’ Writings, 1910-1930.” The course was taught by Robert Herbert, who provided me with an initial list of sources to explore, including the spate of articles written on the relationship of modern art to science in the 1940s and 1950s, which usually centered on the supposed connection between Picasso and Einstein via a “fourth dimension.” Off I went to the library, determined to establish just how it was that a Cubist painter in pre-World War I Paris might have learned of the latest developments in German physics—Albert Einstein’s 1905 Special Theory of Relativity and Minkowski’s 1908 formulation of the space-time continuum. ‘What was this “Fourth Dimension”—capital F, capital D, as it was frequently written in the early twentieth century? My fellow students (and the authors of the mid-century art-science articles I was reading) all seemed to agree that the term signified time, as in Relativity Theory’s fusion of a temporal fourth dimension with the three dimensions of space. A surprise awaited me, however, in the library. When I pulled out the appropriate card catalog drawer, there was a collection of books under the heading “Fourth dimension (philosophy)” that had nothing to do with Einstein. The divider card bore an additional note: “Under this heading are entered only philosophical and imaginative works. For mathematical works, see Hyperspace. See also Space and time.” The fourth dimension of these texts was not time but an extra suprasensible dimension of space, of which our three-dimensional world might be merely a section or boundary. The roots of this idea were apparent in the books on four-dimensional geometry filed under “Hyperspace.” Yet, it was the “philosophical and imaginative” implications of four-dimensional space—primarily as an invisible, higher reality—that had caught the attention of the general public by the turn of the twentieth century, as these books made clear. Further research quickly established how implausible was a supposed artistic interest in Einstein in pre-World War I France: with minor exceptions in Germany and Russia, the general public heard of Einstein only after a 1919 eclipse expedition confirmed one of the predictions of his General Theory of Relativity.? In the library’s card catalog drawer were sources that would soon become very familiar to me, including Claude Fayette Bragdon’s 1913.4 Primer of Higher Space:REINTRODUCTION 3 ‘THE GENERATION OF CORRESPONDING FIGURES IN ONE TWO- THREES, AND FOUR: SPACE! vid. ne LINE A 1SPACE FIGURE GENERATED eer BY THE MOVEMENT’ OF A POINT; CONTAIN: ING AN INTINITE: NUMDGR OF POINTS, AND 2 FORM Is BS nig2, “THE SQUARE: A 2-$PACE FIGURE GENERA DIRECTION PERPENDICULAR ‘TO TISELFTO A DISTANCE EQUAL TO ITS OWN LENGTH TT CONTAINS AN INRINITE NUMBER. OF LINES, AND {§ BOUNDED BY 4 LINES AND 4 POINTS! [| TED BY THE MOVEMENT OF ALINE IN A ras “THE CUBE: A 3-SPACE' FIQURE' OR OLD’ GENERATED BY THE MOVEMENT OF A. SQUARE: IN A DIRECTION PERPENDICULAR ‘TO ITS OWN PLANE, TO 1D A DITANCE Qual THE LENGTH OF THE SQUARE ‘THE CUBE CONTAINS AN PiNEINE Nom BER OF PLANES (SQUARES) AND IS BOUNDED BY 6 SURFACED 12 LINES AND 8 POINTS: ‘THE TESSERACT, OR. TETRA-HYTERCUBE: A-SPACE FIGURE GENERATED BY THE MOVEME'NT CFA CUBR IN THE DIRECTION (TO US UNIMAGIN: OR THE 4TH Dix MENSION. ‘THIS MOVEMENT IS EXTENZED “TO ADISTANCE EQUAL TO ONE EDGE’ CF ‘THE’ CUBE’ AND T'S DIRECTION If PERPEN- DICULAR TO ALL, OUR.3 DIMENSIONS AS A) EACH OF THESE 3 1S PERPENDICULAR TO. Ct THE OTHERS THE TESSERACT CONTAINS: AN INFINITE NUMBER OF FINITE SSA (CUBES) AND IS BOUNDED BY 8CDBES, 24 NZS SQUARES, 32:LINES AND 16 POINTS. (NOTE): PIQURE' 4 1S A SYMBOUC! REPRESENTATION ONLY A SORT OF DIAGRAM —SUCHESTING. SOME: RELATIONS WE CAN PREDICATE OF THE, TRESERAGH. FQURE SMA REPRESENTATION PROOUN ON A DETERENT PRINCIPLE IN ORDER TO BRING OUT é DIPTERENT SET OF RELATIONS. PLATE 1 Fig. RA Claude Bragdon, A Primer of Higher Space (The Fourth Dimension) (Rochester, N.Y: The Manas Press, 1913), Pl. 1‘ REINTRODUCTION The Fourth Dimension (1923 ed.), still the best single introduction to the concept. The architect Bragdon’s beautifully hand-lettered plates, such as figure R{eintrod.]-1, offered an overview of ways of conceiving four-dimensional space, beginning with the geometrical progression from line to plane to cube to hypercube or “tesseract,” shown here in both isometric and perspective projection. Yet Bragdon’s “symbolic representations” of the hypercube, as he terms them, in this plate or of its “folded-down” counterpart (see fig. 1.5, original text) hardly convey its complexity: just as a line contains an infinite number of points or a cube an infinite number of planes, the visually elusive hypercube contains an infinite number of cubes, bounded by eight external cubes. It is little wonder that the relationship of three to two dimensions became a standard analogy for reasoning about four-dimensional objects and space. Bragdon also provided striking illustrations of the sectioning produced as higher dimensional objects pass through the next lower dimensional space (fig. 4.10). Projection offered a similar dimensional reduction, and Bragdon subsequently developed a system of “projective ornament,” based on projections of four- dimensional figures (see, e-g., figs. 4.11, 4.12). Both his 1915 book of that title and his 1916 Four-Dimensional Vistas (1930 ed.) were also cataloged in the drawer. In their striking visual orientation, Projective Ornament and the Primer would prove to be unique among early sources on the fourth dimension and its geometrical manifestations (see, e.g,, figs. 4.9-4.14). But Bragdon’s books also explored the philosophical implications of higher dimensions, building upon the writings of the British mathematician and pioneer of what I would come to call “hyperspace philosophy,” Charles Howard Hinton On one level Hinton’s A New Era of Thought (1888) and The Fourth Dimension (1904) offered a practical, experimental approach to acquiring an understanding of the fourth dimension: readers were to memorize a series of multicolored cubes (fig. 1.7; back cover), whose subsequent visualization was meant to suggest the passage of successive sections of the hypercube through three-dimensional space. Far more influential, in the end, were his philosophical discussions of space and the strongly anti-materialist implications of his conviction that “the human being somehow, in some way, is not simply a three-dimensional being,”* Both Bragdon, a Theosophise, and the Russian journalist Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also initially grounded in Theosophy, developed Hinton’s ideas in more mystical directions, drawing onREINTRODUCTION 5 Neoplatonic philosophy and Indian thought, to argue for the attainment of four- dimensional or “cosmic consciousness.” The card catalog drawer included entries for the Russian (1916) and English (1922) editions of Ouspensky's 1911 Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought, a Key to the Enigmas of the World, as well as a 1967 reprint of his 1934 A New Medel of the Universe: Principles of the Psychological Method and Its Application to Problems of Science, Religion, and Art? Although I did not realize it at the time, the remaining books listed in this section of the catalog provided an initial sampling of other themes that emerged in popular treatments of the fourth dimension, besides its basic geometry and its philosophical and mystical implications. Arthur Willink’s The World of the Unseen: ‘An Essay on the Relation of Higher Space to Things Eternal (1893) typified a sub- genre of Christian theological literature that found in the spatial fourth dimension answers to questions such as the location of Heaven." Ouspensky linked the fourth dimension to infinity, which would become one of the concept’s primary associations, including a treatment of the subject in Belgian Symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1928 volume The Life of Space. Maeterlinck drew upon both Hinton and Ouspensky to update hyperspace philosophy, arguing against Einstein's finite and unbounded universe and the purely temporal fourth dimension of Relativity Theory."' Both Charles William Ross Hooker’s What Is the Fourth Dimension?: Reflections Inspired by a Pair of Gloves (1934) and Dionys Burger's 1957 Sphereland: A Fantasy About Curved Spaces & an Expanding Universe (English edition, 1965) treated three-dimensional mirror symmetry, a prominent topic in discussions of the fourth dimension in the nineteenth and carly wenticth centuries and one that would also play a key role in its revival in the 1960s (fig. R.2)." Just as two- dimensional triangles symmetrical about a line would need to be turned through a third dimension to be superimposed, so three-dimensional, mirror-symmetrical objects, including left and right hands (or left and right-spiraling crystals), would need to be turned through a fourth dimension to be made to coincide. Sphereland was mote specifically a recasting of Edwin Abbot’s Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by a Square of 1884, updating it with the curved spaces and expanding universe of twentieth-century science. Flatland, Abbott's powerful cautionary tale of the refusal of individuals in a two-dimensional world to accept the possibility of higher dimensions, was actually cataloged separately at Yale, probably predating the invention of the category of “philosophical andSYMMETRY IN ANY SPACE THE EVIDENCE OF A HIGHER, DIMENSIONAL ACTION PIQ2 BODATIN IN 450ACR ABOUT A PLANE? ACTERISTIC OF ANIMAL ORGANISMS IS THE RESULT CF DIMEN SL TE ANAL OOLS NE TURING SENSIONAL MOVEMENT TO THE TURN! ABOUT A LINE IN ‘SPACE? "THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT HANDS FOR S MAY OWE THEIR, CORRESPONDENCE OF PARTS TO A4-DIMENSIONAL ROTATION IN THE MINUTE INVISDLE MATTER, OF OURWORID THE EFFECT OF THIS KIND GF A MOTION WOULD BE SUCH AS THE TWO HANDS SHOW. 3DIMENSIONAL, es SQUDS RELATED 1D ONE ee ANOTHER. AS OBJECT AND M:2ROR IMAGE FIG 3 REPRESENTS os CRYSTALS OF A TARCRATE BEARING THE RELATION Fao GF OBIT AND IMAGE FICHANCED INTO. 2 WATHOUT CHEMICAL RESQLUTION AND BIONSTITUTION IT WOULD INDICATE A 47H XXMENSI RAK Fig RZ Beason Pome: ot cher Space, PLBAEINTRODUCTION 7 imaginative works.” However, as the first major popularization of the spatial fourth dimension, Abbot’s book was central to this literature and existed in several editions in the library. Indeed, Flatland has remained in print almost continuously since 1884 and, having been translated into at least fifteen languages by the year 2000, it has introduced more readers to the spatial fourth dimension than any other single source."? 1 gathered many of these books listed under “Fourth Dimension” in the catalog, along with works on four-dimensional geometry by authors such as Brown University mathematics professor Henry P. Manning, who also edited the very useful 1910 volume The Fourth Dimension Simply Explained: A Collection of Essays Selected from Those Submitted in the Scientific American's Prize Competition." My research in the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, always a prime source for the cultural historian, confirmed the widespread interest in the notion in the late nineteenth century and the first twenty years of the new century (see the listings in Appendix B), but the entries dropped off significantly after that, replaced by “see Space and Time” or “see Einstein, Albert” or “Einstein’s theory.” The once-popular spatial fourth dimension seemed to have had its day.'* Further, the 1922 edition of Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum in the Yale Library had not been checked out since 1955. Looking back, I now know that interested individuals had indeed continued to read Ouspensky outside of libraries, since Alfred Knopf kept the book in print through 1955 and reprinted A New Model of she Universe as late as 1967. In 1970 Ouspensky’s two major books would be issued in paperback by Random House, and paperback editions of Bragdon’s books would follow as well during the 1970s." Yet there had clearly been a hiatus in the life of the spatial fourth dimension as a major cultural force—and certainly as a prominent theme in the art world, My graduate school work thus focused on the centrality of the idea for modern artists in the early ewentieth century, including French Cubists, the subject of both that first seminar paper and a 1971 Art Quarterly article, as well as the range of artists addressed in my 1975 dissertation.” The 1983 edition of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, reprinted here, added a chapter on early twentieth-century American art and a brief concluding section on the role of these ideas in art and theory since 1930. However, apart from a discussion of painter Tony Robbin (fig. 7.7), the one contemporary artist I knew of who was exploring four-dimensional geometry, and a reference to the pioneering work in8 REINTRODUCTION four-dimensional computer graphics of mathematician Thomas Banchoff with programmer Charles Strauss (fig, 7.6), the 1983 edition essentially came to a close in the 1940s. By mid-century the large-scale cultural embrace of “space-time” seemed to have brought a definitive end to the romance of artists and higher spatial dimensions— with the exception, as far as I could tell, of a few mystically inclined artists, such as Irene Rice Pereira (fig. 7.1). Nonetheless, observing the activity of Robbin and Banchoff, I concluded the book in 1983 with the optimistic assertion that perhaps the fourth dimension was “on the verge of a new phase of influence.” I also based that suggestion on the occasional appearance in the late 1970s/early 1980s of fourth dimension-related references in a variety of popular culture venues, such as a November 1980 Doonesbury comic strip and the cartoon “The Fourth Dimension Bar and Grill” in the October 1981 issue of Science 81 (fig. R.3).'* In this humorous caricature of Cubism, the complexities of four-dimensional space dominate the image, trumping the references to time in the abnormal clock. Press coverage of Banchof’s lectures and showings of his 1978 film The Hypercube: Projections and Slicings, were stimulating some of this fourth-dimensional ferment. In particular, a September 1977 UPI newspaper feature on Banchoff, “Professor Eyes 4th Dimension,” reached readers, including me, at breakfast tables across the nation." In addition, the Christian Science Monitor seemed particularly interested in the topic, publishing a major story on Banchoff in 1985, following upon another fourth dimension-related article in 1981. Although I was not yet aware of it, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy had actually used the phrase “fourth dimension of Spirit” to contrast Spirit to the “mortal error” of matter, resulting in a particular sensitivity to the topic at the newspaper.” Beyond such specific stimuli for the spatial fourth dimension’s resurgence, the broader renewal then beginning was also a continuation of a cultural recovery that had started in the late 1950s. My 1983 suggestion of a “new phase” of interest in the idea would prove far more prophetic than I could ever have guessed, at least in culture, if not specifically in the art world. In 1983 the only contemporary scientific phenomenon that seemed at all comparable to the earlier public fascination with the spatial fourth dimension was the “Black Hole,” which had emerged in popular literature in 1970s. However, as noted above, important new developments were occurring at that veryREINTRODUCTION 9 Fig. R3 M. Stevens, “The Fourth Dimension Bar and Grill,” Science 61, no. 2 (October 1981), 26. moment in the field of physics, and, equally important, the era of digital computing for the public at large was dawning. The year 1984 is the date standardly cited for the birth of “superstring” theory, a field whose focus on higher spatial dimensions would contribute significantly during the 1980s and 1990s to reigniting interest in early twentieth-century discussions of the fourth dimension. Similarly, 1984 was the year in which William Gibson introduced the term cyberspace in his science fiction novel Neuromancer, and, subsequently, the new availability of personal computers, increased graphics capabilities, and ultimately, the Internet, would revolutionize visualization and communication techniques.”! In the 1980s and 1990s the field of four-dimensional computer graphics, pioneered by Banchoff and Strauss, would emerge as an active area of creative endeavor for artists like Robbin and for architects such as Marcos Novak (figs. R.23, R.24). Increasingly sophisticated computer graphics programs have made possible new approaches to imaging four-dimensional space that early twentieth-century artists could hardly have imagined.10 REINTRODUCTION Yet, this history was not one of sudden return from a complete vacuum at mid- century. The marketing of “Fourth Dimension” perfume by Helena Rubenstein’s House of Gourielli, beginning in 1953, obviously presumed popular awareness of the concept in some form (fig. R.4). While most wearers of “Fourth Dimension” perfume probably associated it with time and Relativity Theory, the advertisement, with its strong suggestion of Cubist or Futurist ray lines, relies on the link becween modern art and the spatial fourth dimension cemented earlier in the century.? In fact, by the late 1950s/early 1960s Martin Gardner was beginning to refer to the geometrical fourth dimension and its history in his “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American, and its revival was clearly underway by the 1960s. Science fiction had served as an underground thread of continuity for the spatial fourth dimension from the 1930s to the 1960s, and that function would become far more public and prominent in the later decades of the century—from films such as The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension of 1984 to the Predator comic book Invaders from the Fourth Dimension of 1994. Finally, mystical and occult literature kept the memory of the spatial fourth dimension alive. Ouspensky's books, in particular, had a larger readership in the 1940s and 1950s than I had ever imagined, found new life in the 1960s, and have continued to attract readers up to the present. This was also the context for the 1967 Broadway musical Hair, with its “Walking in Space” song lyric, “On a rocket to the Fourth Dimension / Total self awareness the intention.” Although the multiple significations of the popular “fourth dimension” had led by mid-century to discrete identities that were no longer so clearly connected or rooted in a single concept, my 1983 conclusion that its cultural impact was largely over by the late 1940s was too pessimistic. Instead, the fate of the fourth dimension during the twentieth century was one of waxing and waning interest in the spatial or temporal identities of the concept. Thus, while time and Relativity Theory dominated the period of the 1930s through the 1970s, the spatial, geometrical interpretation was most prominent at the beginning and end of the century. Readers will have noticed that my retrospective view from the twenty-first century centers on the fourth dimension and not the non-Euclidean geometry that figures equally in my title, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. While the various non-Euclidean geometries of curved spaces had a major impact on philosophy in the nineteenth century and on art in the earlyREINTRODUCTION " Gourielli Presents FOURTH DIMENSION’ Perle, 22.50 10 350 Toilet Water,550 Coleg 350,225 A new note in fregranee...complex, high key, exciting oh soa Bal Fig. Ra House of Gourieli “Fourth Dimension” perfume advertisement, Vogue, 126 (Now. 1,195), 36.2 REINTRODUCTION twentieth century, they never experienced the widespread popularity of the far more adaptable and suggestive fourth dimension of space. Non-Euclidean geometry’s challenge to Euclid’s axioms and to related conceptions of absolute truth made it a powerful symbol of revolt and iconoclasm that was embraced by artists such as Duchamp (fig, 3.6) and, especially, the Surrealists, including Salvador Dali and Matta Echaurren (see fig. 7.2, 7.4).2° However, once non-Euclidean, irregular curvature had been adopted by Einstein to model effects of gravity in the space-time continuum of General Relativity (1916), it became a fixture of twentieth-century science and, unlike the spatial fourth dimension, never disappeared or needed to be recovered.” Among the best-known images suggestive of non-Euclidean geometry in the mid-twentieth century were those of the Circle Limit series of Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher (fig, R.18), who is addressed in the context of the 1960s below. Since that time, artists interested in cosmology and the irregular curvature of the space-time continuum of General Relativity have also engaged non-Euclidean geometry, including both Tony Robbin and Marcos Novak, as discussed near the end of the Reintroduction. Nineteen eighty-four, the year after this book appeared, was the centennial year of Flatland, and Thomas Banchoff staged a celebratory symposium at Brown University, titled Visualizing Higher Dimensions: Flatland 1884 | Hypergraphics 1984. The interdisciplinary event, which attracted an audience of hundreds over several days, was a gathering point for the still relatively small cadre of individuals from a variety of fields who shared an interest in the spatial fourth dimension in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Brown symposium was accompanied by the exhibition Hypergraphics 1984 at the Rhode Island School of Design, organized by faculty member Harriet Brisson in honor of her late husband, artist David Brisson." Beginning in 1976 David Brisson—through symposia and exhibitions—had begun to build a community interested in the topic, as his 1978 anthology Hypergraphics: Visualizing Complex Relationships in Art, Science and Technology documents.” Speakers and presenters of films at the 1984 Flatland symposium included a number of individuals who had already written on, or would go on to publish on, the fourth dimension, including Rudy Rucker, A. K. Dewdney, Arthur Loeb, Michele Emmer, Banchoff, and myself. Audience members such as painter Robbin, mathematician Jeffrey Weeks, topologist George Francis, and science journalist Ivars Peterson would also make important contributions to this field.?°REINTRODUCTION 3 Another of the contributors to David Brisson’s Hypergraphics anthology had been computer programmer and innovative graphic artist Scott Kim. When Kim applied for a grant in this period, he found it necessary to clarify immediately his usage of the term fourth dimension: ““4-dimensional space’ refers to a space of 4 perpendicular spatial dimensions, not the 3 space dimensions used in physics.”*" In a culture still dominated by Relativity Theory, this was the mantra we all found ourselves repeating again and again to puzzled listeners, and that was particularly true in the field of art history. There the temporal fourth dimension of Relativity Theory had a particularly strong presence because of the staying power of the Cubism-Relativity myth that had emerged in the 1940s around references to a “fourth dimension” in Cubist literature.” Alfred Bart's discussion of Picasso's Cubism in his 1943 primer What Is Modern Painting? was typical: “This introduction of a time element into an art usually considered in terms of two- or three-dimensional space suggests some relationship to Einstein's theory of relativity in which time is thought of mathematically as a fourth dimension.”® It is little wonder that Duchamp, who had, in fact, been the primary artist-student of four- dimensional geometry and space in the 1910s, rightly critiqued the urge to link these two prominent cultural figures in some way. As he declared in a 1967 interview, “The public always needs a banner; whether it be Picasso, Einstein, or some other.” The goal of my dissertation and of the first edition of this book was to recover the forgotten spatial fourth dimension so central to early twentieth-century art and culture, along with the impact of non-Euclidean geometry. This new edition reprints the 1983 book verbatim, with only minor typographical or other corrections, and the Reintroduction both briefly augments the original book’s coverage through the 1940s and samples the post-1950 history of the fourth dimension. A sequel to the original book, currently in process, presents a fuller discussion of the post-1950 period and enlarges the account of the first half of the century presented in 1983. The new discoveries offered there in relation to earlier modernism include, for example, the presence of Bragdon’s Primer of Higher Space in the Bauhaus studio of Johannes Itten, who copied images such as the skeletal illustration of clairvoyant vision (fig. R.6) into his 1920 daybook.* Beyond this testament to Bragdon’s international impact, the presence of the Primer at the Weimar Bauhaus has ramifications as well for the art of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky's own" REINTRODUCTION ruminations on geometry and space. Although the case of Itten is not presented herein, this Reintroduction does treat the most important new addition to the catalog of earlier twentieth-century artists for whom the fourth dimension was critical: American Cubist Stuart Davis. As discussed in the second half of the section “Augmenting a 1983 History” that follows, Davis found in contemporary interpretations of the four-dimensional space-time continuum of Relativity Theory as a “block universe” a rationale for a painting style that transcended the accidents of individual perception (fig. R.9). ‘The other most important element missing from the original book and treated initially in the following supplemental section is the scientific context for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century interest in the spatial fourth dimension— that is, late Victorian ether physics. Contrary to the standard historical narratives suggesting that Einstein’s publication of the Special Theory of Relativity in 1905 immediately dislodged contemporary belief in the ether, for the first two decades of the twentieth century the layperson’s understanding of the word space was linked inextricably to the “ether of space.” That invisible, impalpable medium, understood to fill al space and to transmit vibrating electromagnetic waves (e.g, X-rays, or the Hertzian waves of wireless celegraphy), was central to the world view of both laypersons and a number of prominent scientists, such as Sir Oliver Lodge.” While the original edition of the book notes Hinton’s linking of the ether to four- dimensional space, only my subsequent study of early twentieth-century science revealed how closely connected contemporary scientific ideas, including both the ether and the X-ray, were to conceptions of a fourth spatial dimension.2” Thus, the discussion that follows here (and is presented more fully in the sequel) provides another layer of context for the modern artists who responded so creatively to the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometry at the beginning of the last century. The final section of the Reintroduction then samples the major fourth dimension-related developments in art and culture of the later twentieth century, examining as well the sources on the spatial fourth dimension that contributed to its initial, small-scale revival in the later 1950s and the 1960s. It concludes with the developments in physics and computer graphics, along with cyberspace, that brought higher spatial dimensions to broad public attention once again. Tracking the fourth dimension through the entire twentieth century points up both continuities and contrasts between the pre-and post-World War II eras, a historicalREINTRODUCTION 15 division regularly made within art history. Thus, for example, the widespread goal of revealing invisible higher dimensions in the early years of the century found its counterpart in the quest for expanded perception and consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s. This initial tracking also suggests that the fourth dimension may be a leitmotif not only of early modernism but, in varying degrees at different moments, of the twentieth century as a whole. ‘Augmenting a 1983 History of the Fourth Dimension in Culture and Art (1900-1950) X-Rays and Ether Physics as the Context for the “Fourth Dimension” A succession of scientific discoveries and developments beginning in the 1890s radi- cally altered commonly held conceptions of the nature of matter and space in the early twentieth century. These included Wilhelm Réntgen’s discovery of the X-ray (1895), J. J. Thomson’s identification of the electron (1897), Marie and Pierre Curie’s isolation of radioactive elements (1898), Ernest Rutherford’s work on radio- activity and the structure of the atom in the following years, and the emergence of wireless telegraphy in the late 1890s, based on the electromagnetic waves Heinrich Hertz had identified in the 1880s. All of these phenomena pointed to the existence of an invisible reality just beyond the reach of sense perception. Readily accessible to the public by means of a vast amount of popular scientific writing, these new devel- opments were also highlighted for the public by spectacular popular scientific dem- onstrations, such as those of Nikola Tesla, and by practical applications such as medical X-rays and the new wireless communication.” Contemporary periodicals, for example, provided instructions for wiring an antenna to one’s apartment bal- cony in otder to pick up the time signals sent out from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Wireless telegraphy, in particular, directed public attention to the ether as the medium bearing the new Hertzian waves, or radio waves, as they would come to be known with the subsequent emergence of radio during the 1910s.” I have adopted the term meta-reality to characterize this radically expanded understanding of the physical world in the early years of the twentieth century—a climate in which interest in possible higher dimensions could thrive."" As historian of science Iwan Rhys Morus has aptly pointed out, the fact that “the boundaries of the16 REINTRODUCTION real were so weak” in this period allowed speculation on topics such as the ether and electricity to thrive in the context of what he terms “Victorian futurism.”* But the exhilaration of the 1890s was not only a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Instead, the public’s preoccupation with the invisible, including the ether, X-rays, and the fourth dimension, remained prominent well into the 1910s, contrary to histories that . suggest the impact of Einstein and Relativity Theory was felt immediately in 1905. For advocates of the spatial fourth dimension, the discovery of the X-ray (fig. R.5) was the single most important scientific support for their case. After December 1895 it was impossible for anyone to argue against the existence of a fourth dimension of space simply because it could not be seen. As astronomer Camille Flammarion declared in his 1900 book L'Inconnu of “the late discovery of the Réntgen rays”: “This is indeed a most eloquent example in favor of the axiom: it is unscientific to assert that realities are stopped by the limits of our knowledge and observation.” X-rays and the fourth dimension came together most often in the theme of clairvoyance, as illustrated by Bragdon (fig. R.6), since, just as a Fig. RS “Photographic proof obtained by Dr. Voller of Hamburg,” in “La Découverte du Dr. Roentgen,” Llilustration, Jan. 25, 1896, p.73.REINTRODUCTION MAN AS SEEN BY CLAIRVOYANT (4-DIMENSION- AL VISION), AND BY ORDINARY HUMAN SIGHT A 2;SDACE ‘MAN’ INHABITING A. PLANE WOULD SEE ONLY ‘THE LUNES BOUNDING THE SOLIDS" (PLANE FIGURES) OF HIS WORLD A3-SPACE MAN SEES THE \ ENCLOSED SURFACE AS WELL tH, AS THE BOUNDARIES OF SUCH Pere CEIVING "THEM TO SE! NOT REALTY SOUDS, BUT ~ ae ‘DIMENSIONAL SOLIDS—CLAII [RVOVANT: VISION IS CP THIS OR SES eae ena SEEN CLAIRVOYANT LY. THE INTERNAL, STRUCTURE OF THE HUMAN BODY Is VISIBLE WITHIN ITS CASING, ALSO THE AURA, OR HIGHER DIMENSIONAL BODY PLATE 19 Fig. RS Bragdon, Primer of Higher Space, Pl. 19.8 REINTRODUCTION three-dimensional being could easily see into closed forms in a two-dimensional world, four-dimensional sight would penetrate solid objects like an X-ray. Theosophist C. W. Leadbeater would make the fourth dimension central to his discussions of both clairvoyance and “astral vision,” contributing further to the concept’s widespread popularity. The X-ray established definitively the limited nature of human perception: the eye sees only the narrow band of visible light in the much larger electromagnetic spectrum. That theme was widely illustrated in this period by means of a “table of vibrations,” showing the many ranges of invisible vibrations on either side of visible light, which Sir William Crookes had first published in an 1897 Revue Scientifique article, “De la relativité des connaissances humaines.” Against this backdrop, avant-garde artists found themselves liberated both from the dominance of visible light (and the related technique of chiaroscuro modeling) and from a world understood as three dimensional and, hence, best rendered in one-point linear perspective, as it had been since the Renaissance. Instead, painting could now pursue a meta-reality characterized by invisible dimensions and the new concepts of matter and space revealed by contemporary science, including not only the X-ray but also the dematerialization of matter suggested by radioactive emissions.*® Drawing extensively on both science and occultism, as was quite common in this period, the Futurist Umberto Boccioni, for example, declared in 1911, “What needs to be painted is not the visible but what heretofore has been held to be invisible, that is, what the clairvoyant painter sees.” Or, as he had written the year before, “Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies... ? Why should we forget the doubled power of our sight, capable of giving results analogous to the X-rays?” If the recognition of the relativity of knowledge, discussed further in chapter 1, provided support for advocates of the possible existence of a suprasensible fourth dimension, encouragement had come from another important scientific source well before the discovery of the X-ray. That occurred in the remarkable book by British scientists Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait, The Unseen Universe, or Physical Speculations on a Future State, first published in 1875.** The invisible ether was a central element in Stewart and Tait’s book, and they were the first—in a revised edition of the book in 1876—to connect the concept of the ether and the fourth dimension, Thus, this widely read text (the book went through twenty-eight reprintings or new editions between 1875 and 1910 and was translated into FrenchREINTRODUCTION 9 in 1883) is an important element in the history of the fourth dimension not treated in the 1983 edition of this book.” For Stewart and Tait, who sought to reconcile science and religion, the ether was a potential link between things seen and unseen; it also offered a possible solution to the specter of the “heat death” of the universe raised by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which loomed large in the later nineteenth century. As they explain, “In fine, what we generally call ether may be not a mere medium, but a medium plus the invisible order of things, so that when the motions of the visible universe are transferred into ether, part of them are conveyed as by a bridge into the invisible universe, and are there made use of or stored up.”* In the fourth, revised edition of April 1876 the authors adopted the fourth dimension as a model for this relationship, suggesting that the three-dimensional world might be “merely the skin or boundary of an Unseen whose matter has four dimensions” with the ether as. a bridge to this world. Moreover, “the matter of our present universe may be regarded as produced by mere rents or cracks in that Unseen.”5" The concept of a space-filling “ether” had been discussed by Aristotle as well as by Newton, long before Augustin-Jean Fresnel posited the “luminiferous ether” in the 1820s in the context of his wave theory of light. What was new about the ether in the later nineteenth century was the considerable expansion of its hypothetical functions, including its possible role as the source of all matter. Lord Kelvin had proposed in the 1860s that atoms might actually be whirling vortices of ether. Similarly, at the turn of the century the physicists Sir Oliver Lodge and Joseph Larmor propounded an “electric theory of matter,” grounded in the ether, to which both Boccioni and Wassily Kandinsky refer in their writings. As Lord Balfour declared of the ether in his 1904 address before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, “It seems possible now that it may be the stuff out of which [the] universe is wholly built.”>* Nineteenth-century conceptions of the ether ranged from a thin elastic jelly to a swirling fluid. In order to transmit vibrating electromagnetic waves, including light, however, the mysterious ether required the rigidity of an elastic solid; at the same time, it must allow the free motion of bodies through it and be rarefied enough to flow through the interstices of even the densest matter. Not surprisingly, the writing on the ether by both scientists and popularizers is filled with metaphor, including the passage of water through a sieve or sponge. Thus, science writer20 REINTRODUCTION Robert Kennedy Duncan asserted in his 1905 book The New Knowledge: “Not only through interstellar spaces, but through the world also, in all its manifold complexity, through our own bodies; all lie not only encompassed in it but soaking in it as a sponge lies soaked in water.”* The ether was a central element of the invisible meta-reality of the early twentieth century, and, as in Stewart and Tait’s writings, it was often linked to the fourth dimension. Hinton, who surely knew The Unseen Universe, theorized an infinitely small extension of the ether into the fourth dimension to explain a variety of phenomena relating to electricity, including the nature of electrical current, as discussed in chapter 1.°° Bragdon likewise suggested in his discussion of symmetry in the Primer of Higher Space that two-dimensional symmetry in vegetal growth might result from “rotation about a central axis of the etheric particles” in the leafs next “higher space” (fig. R.2).°” Although, like the fourth dimension, the ether would ultimately be eclipsed to a large degree by Relativity Theory and the world of space-time after 1919, the concept had a remarkable hold on the popular imagination and continued to be supported by a surprising range of scientists, including its primary champion, Lodge, through the 1910s and beyond. Reflecting the mood of the ether’s adherents, Sir J. J. Thomson declared in his presidential address before the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1909, “The ether is not a fantastic creation of the speculative philosopher; it is as essential to us as the air we breathe. . . . The study of this all-pervading substance is perhaps the most fascinating duty of the physicist.” Both the ether and the fourth dimension were sites where science (or geometry in the case of the fourth dimension) and occultism readily intersected, as they often did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, prominent scientists, such the chemist Crookes, the physicist Lodge, and the astronomer Flammarion, were deeply interested in spiritualism and telepathy. Crookes’s 1897 Revue Scientifique article on the relativity of knowledge had, in fact, been given as his presidential address before the Society for Psychical Research, a group in which both Lodge and Flammarion were also involved.® At the same time, Theosophists such as Madame Blavatsky and Leadbeater followed closely the latest developments in science that supported their case against positivism and materialism. The German Theosophist Rudolf Steiner, who founded Anthroposophy in 1912, regularly discussed the “wise man” Hinton’s exercises for learning to visualize aREINTRODUCTION a four-dimensional object in his European lectures between 1905 and 1908 and continued to address the topic into the 1920s. Similarly, occultists or scientists with occult interests found in the new scientific discoveries specific support for occult practices, and comparisons between X-rays and spirit photography, a radioactivity and alchemy, or wireless telegraphy and telepathy were common This symbiotic relationship between science and occultism is another important aspect of modernism’s cultural context—pointed up by the fourth dimension and the ether—that was critical for many of the major figures of art and literature in this era, Although occultism can overlap with mysticism, it is important to clarify that the terms are not identical. According to historian Robert Galbreath, occultism is “an attitude toward the world that emphasizes the hidden, or secret aspects of reality” and often involves knowledge that must be studied or for which new “cognitive faculties of appropriate sensitivity” must be awakened. Mysticism, by contrast, is a much more specific term referring to “the experience of mystical union or direct communion with ultimate reality.”® Following the publication of this book in 1983, the exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1986 provided an opportunity to consider the rhetoric surrounding the fourth dimension in relation to both the mystical and Romantic traditions. My essay for that catalog, titled “Mysticism, Romanticism, and the Fourth Dimension,” examined three of the major early twentieth-century texts on the fourth dimension—by painter Max Weber (New York, 1910), by Cubist critic Guillaume Apollinaire (Paris, 1912-13), and by the Russian proponent of four- dimensional “cosmic consciousness” P. D. Ouspensky (St. Petersburg, 1911). The themes shared in varying degrees by these texts—infinity, monism (versus dualism), and the evolution of consciousness—point up the debe of much early writing on the fourth dimension to both Romanticism and the mystical tradition, including its connection to infinity and the role it assumed for some as the twentieth-century sublime. In addition to the theory and art of the French Cubists and Weber, the essay addressed the embrace of Ouspensky’s philosophy by André Breton and his younger Surrealist followers, who read Tertium Organum in summer 1938. The text also highlighted the importance for both Weber and Ouspensky of British Whitmanite and social reformer Edward Carpenter, who had coined the phrase2 REINTRODUCTION “universal ot cosmic consciousness” in 1892 after his travels in Indian and Ceylon and meetings with an Indian Yogi. In that state of higher consciousness, which Carpenter linked to the fourth dimension, “the distinction between subject and object [would] fall away,” a theme echoed in Weber's emphasis on the identity of matter and thought in his 1910 essay “The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View.” In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of the spatial fourth dimension both mystical and occult traditions played important roles, along with the concept’s roots in geometry and connections to science. Further, the revival of idealist philosophy in the late nineteenth-century, upon which Hinton drew heavily, contributed significantly to the cultural milieu in which the fourth dimension could thrive. Like Abbott’s Flatland, Plato’s allegory of the cave, with its bound prisoners mistaking shadows for reality, functioned as a powerful philosophical caution against denying the possible existence of higher dimensional space. Indeed, the fourth dimension, along with new scientific developments such as the X-ray, offered a means to update the Symbolist model of the artist as a visionary seer, as argued by figures such as Albert Aurier in the early 1890s.” Cubist painting forms the subject of chapter 2 herein, but a few words about its relationship to the X-ray, radioactivity, and the ether can usefully augment that discussion. To a typical Analytical Cubist painting of 1910, such as Picasso’s Portrait of Ambroise Vollard (Fig. 2.4) ot his Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (fig. R.7), we may add Boccioni’s 1912 portrait of his mother, Materia (fig. R.8), in order to consider briefly the relationship of both Cubism and Futurism to science, along with the fourth dimension. While Boccioni would address the fourth dimension specifically only in 1914—and then primarily in relation to his sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space of that year (fig. 2.24)—the fourth dimension played an important theoretical role in the evolution of the Cubist style itself. As argued in chapter 2, Picasso’s paintings of this period demonstrate the denial of three-dimensional perspective and freedom to distort or deform objects that Apollinaire associated with the fourth dimension as discussed “in the language of the modern studios.” Like one of E. Jouffret's pioneering visualizations of higher dimensional geometrical objects (fig. 2.3), both Picasso portraits shimmer with varying degrees of shading on overlapping, semitransparent facets.” And, as interpreted by the more theoretically oriented Salon or Puteaux Cubists, such asFig. RI Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, 1910, oil on canvas. Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman in memory of Charles B. Goodspeed. (Photo: Art institute of Chicago). ©2012 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New YorkFig. RB Umberto Boccioni, Mattar, 1912, oll on canvas. Gianni Mattioli Collection, Milan; long-term loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. (Photo: Luce Carre, Milan).REINTRODUCTION 2B Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger (figs. 2.7, 2.9, 2.11, 2.12, 2.15, 2.20), Cubist paintings also denied perspective by combining multiple viewpoints on the model of Henri Poincaré’s discussions of how one might represent a four-dimensional object and of the dimensional potential of engaging both “tactile space and motor ea Behind Picasso’s (and Georges Braque’s) development of their Analytical Cubise style lay their study of works by Paul Cézanne, which suggest a geometric substructure beneath nature’s surfaces, and their recognition of the conceptual orientation of works of African art, which offered a model for communicating with a few, carefully chosen metonymical signs. Yet the dissolution of the boundaries of objects and the fluidity and transparency of forms in the Picasso portraits were hardly conclusions to have been drawn simply from their artistic models, as formalist histories of Cubism have often suggested.”? Instead, the X-ray, cited specifically by Boccioni (noted above), as well as radioactivity and the ether all offered radically transformed conceptions of matter and space that would have stimulated the creative imaginations of these artists. Beyond demonstrating the limitations of the human eye (and the concomitant downgrading of the status of visible light), X-rays offered views of a reality beneath the surfaces of objects. Even more startling was the revelation that radioactive substances were constantly emitting alpha and beta particles and gamma rays, thus changing their chemical composition and emitting energy.” In his best-selling books, such as Z ‘Evolution de La matiére of 1905, scientific popularizer Gustave Le Bon argued that all substances were radioactive and that matter was only “a stable form of intra-atomic energy” in the gradual process of decaying back into the ether of space around it.” At the same time, “the electric theory of matter, according to which matter is only energy,” as Boccioni cited it, suggested that matter was simultaneously cohering from the ether.’> With their Neo-Impressionist broken brushstrokes strongly suggesting particulate emissions, both Picasso's and Boccioni’s paintings suggest the interpenetration of figures and a vibrating, ether-filled space in a state of continuous cohesion and dissolution. Le Bon was a close friend of the philosopher Henri Bergson, whose importance for Cubism has been established conclusively by Mark Antliff, just as Brian Petrie had done earlier for Boccioni’s commitment to Bergson.” If Bergson’s advocacy of reality as flux and his argument that “all division of matter into independent bodies26 REINTRODUCTION with absolutely determined outlines is an artificial division” parallels Le Bon’s theories based on radioactivity, itis because both Bergson and Le Bon were grounded in the ether physics of this era.”” In his 1896 book Matiére et mémoire, reprinted in 1910, Bergson had cited the physicists Michael Faraday and Lord Kelvin and had noted that Lord Kelvin “supposes a perfect, continuous, homogenous and incompressible fluid, filling space: what we term an atom he makes into a vortex ring, ever whirling in this continuity.””* Later in the chapter, he makes another ether-oriented statement that would prove particularly apt for Cubism and Futurism: “Matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other and traveling in every direction like shivers through an immense body.”” Boccioni brought together his interests in Bergson, the fourth dimension, and, most fundamentally, the ether in his sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space of 1913 (fig. 2.24). The discussion of this work at the conclusion of chapter 2 presented the first analysis of the work in relation to Boccioni’s talk in his 1914 book Pistura scultura futuriste of a dynamic “species of the fourth dimension” he equated with the “continuous projections of forces and forms intuited in their infinite unfolding”—as if a higher dimensional form were revealing itself as it passed through three-dimensional space, akin to Hinton’s discussion of a spiral passing through a plane (fig. 2.25).*” Yet, as did so many others in this period, Boccioni clearly associated the fourth dimension with the ether, the ultimate sign of continuity. Near the end of his treatise, he specifically equates the “materialization of the ethereal fluid, the imponderable” with “the unique form of continuity in space.”*' Thus, this well-known sculpture, whose title has been an enigma for later viewers, stands as one of the most successful materializations of the ether in early twentieth-century art. Like Boccioni and the Cubists, a number of other artists addressed in the 1983 book, including Frantiek Kupka, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Weber, also engaged the model of the ether in varying ways, since it was the default understanding of space for the first two decades of the century. I have discussed the relevance of the ether for each of these artists elsewhere, and those texts enlarge but do not fundamentally alter the discussions herein. In sum, for Kupka (and for Kandinsky) thought transfer via vibrations of ether—on the model of wireless telegraphy as well as telepathy—offered the possibility of a new kind of direct connection between aREINTRODUCTION 2 painted canvas surface and its viewer." Wireless telegraphy likewise served Duchamp as the vehicle for the communication between the Bride and the Bachelors of his masterwork The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glas) (fig. 3.5), which he considered a “painting of frequency.”® In the large number of notes Duchamp made for the project, he drew extensively on contemporary science and technology to augment the four- to three-dimensional contrasts between the upper and lower halves of the Glass that are discussed in chapter 3 herein. Thus, he defined an etherial, gravity-free, indefinite space for the biomechanical Bride, whose “splendid vibrations” control the activities of the purely mechanical Bachelors below. In contrast to the Bride, they are confined in a gravity-bound, measured, perspectival space ruled by Duchamp’s “Playful Physics,” grounded in classical mechanics. While Kupka and Duchamp responded to the ether as a communications medium, Weber's approach in his Cubist paintings of 1912-1915 was closer to that of Picasso and Braque, his primary stylistic sources. This diffusion of form in Weber's mature paintings (figs. 4.4~4.6) was all the more remarkable, given his exposure in Paris during 1905-1908 to Leo Stein's discussions of the fourth dimension in relation to tactility and plasticity in Cézanne’s painting.® The emphasis on matter and material objects in Weber's 1910 “Plastic Point of View” essay, along with the almost hypermateriality of his paintings of 1910-11 (figs. 4.2, 4.3), undoubtedly had further roots in Edward Carpenter's monist world view.** By contrast, in Weber's subsequent works, such as Interior of the Fourth Dimension of 1913, he, like Picasso and Braque, left behind the tactility and plasticity of Cézanne to engage a four-dimensional reality closely associated with the ether of space and contemporary paradigms of dematerializing matter. Like Cubist and Futurist paintings, these works function as “windows” on an invisible meta-reality of higher dimensions and etherial energies. ‘Stuart Davis and Four-Dimensional Space-Time in the Era of Einstein If Weber's innovative Cubist paintings of 1912-15 built upon the Analytical Cubism of Picasso and Braque, Stuart Davis's style drew upon their subsequent collage-based Synthetic Cubism, which Picasso had inaugurated in May 1912 and the two artists had quickly adopted as a new model for painting as well (figs. 2.8,i REINTRODUCTION 2.19). Thus, unlike Weber, Davis created highly colored, hard-edged, planar images not meant to be looked “through” but to stand as objective diagrams of the landscape (fig. R.9). Having spent a year in Paris in 1928-29, Davis in the early 1930s began to develop his mature theories about how to paint landscapes in a modern style that both respected the two-dimensional surface of the canvas and could evoke landscape space.®” Although not previously documented in the litera- ture on Davis, Einstein and Relativity Theory actually played a fundamental role in the development of his mature painting style and theory. Einstein had attracted Davis's attention when he visited the United States as a guest at Cal Tech during the winters of 1930-31 and 1931-32, triggering a burst of journalistic coverage as well as the reference in the song “As Time Goes By” to “gec{ting] a trifle weary with Mr. Einstein’s theory.® Yet Davis was hardly weary of Einstein’s theory in this period. In his 1932 daybook, Davis responded directly to one of the major popularizations of Einstein’s theories, James Jeans’s The Mysterious Universe of 1932. Davis's drawings (fig. R.10) mirror Jeans’s “Diagram to illustrate the motion of a train in space and time,” using x and y axes to indicate time elapsed and mileage covered and a diagonal line graphing the train's progress (fig. R.11). Realizing the new significance of the sides and hypotenuse of the triangles thus generated, Davis notes, “When you draw this—you are drawing this rectan[gular] linear space, potentially” and “you are drawing this angular direction, potentially, when you draw this.”® The element of time could thus be signified by particular angular configurations, and he muses further on this new diagrammatic language: ‘The picture is a fourth dimensional observation which simply means that it occurs in Time. The unit of Time is the triangle which is assumed to exist outside of Time, in other words it is an abstraction and does not have reality until set in motion by duplication. A triangle could be analogous to a second of Time. The picture itself could be called a Duration of so many seconds of Time (Einstein has said that space [sic] is a fourth dimension), Therefore we must build the picture with four coordinates. .. .”! Time would continue to be a central issue for Davis, although he would ultimately leave planar angular variation behind as a primary organizing elementREINTRODUCTION 2 9t StillScape for Six Colors—7th Avenue Style, 1940, oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, ym H. Lane Foundation and the M. and M. Karolik Collection, by exchange. (Photo: Museum of FineFig. R10. Stuart Davis, Daybook drawing, 1982. From Stuart Davis, ed. Diane Kelder (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971), 56. Fig. RAY “Diagram to illustrate the motion of a train in space and time,” in James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1931), p. 108.REINTRODUCTION a and pursue what he termed “color-space.””” While remaining committed to the two-dimensional surface of his paintings, Davis now followed Jeans up a dimension in order to create a logical space that would transcend the accidents of perception.” As Jeans had written following his space-time diagram, “We can imagine the three dimensions of space and one of time welded together, forming a four-dimensional volume, which we shall describe as a ‘continuum.’ Indeed, Davis's adoption of the hyphenated “color-space” to describe his approach to space-making via color suggests a deliberate response to the space-time continuum, which was to become a conceptual touchstone for his painting, ‘When Davis painted Hor Still-Scape for Six Colors in 1940 (fig. R.9), he wrote of the new kind of “reality” the work embodied: ‘The painting is abstract in the sense that it is highly selective, and it is synthetic in that it recombines these selections of color and shape into a new unity, which never existed in Nature but is a new part of Nature. An analogy would be a chemical like sulphanilamide which is a product of abstract selection and synthetic combination, and which never existed before, but is none the less real and a new part of nature.” In Jeans’s discussions of the space-time continuum Davis would have found support for his position in contemporary debates about abstract painting, According to Jeans, while it could be said that “the four-dimensional continuum is... . purely diagrammatic, . . . because we can exhibit all nature within this framework, it must correspond to some sort of objective reality.”® Similarly, Davis argued in his 1945 “Autobiography,” “Through science the whole concept of what reality is has been changed. Science has achieved the most astounding ‘abstract’ compositions, completely ‘unnatural,’ but none-the-less real.”” Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors, subtitled 7h Avenue Style, reflects Davis's exuberant embrace of urban experience, including the “hoc” jazz chythms that delighted him in and around his 7th Avenue studio. Yet rather than depicting specific elements of his urban environment, Davis, as he subsequently explained, “introduced Time into Form by referring the immediate concrete shapes to more general shapes which have a much more extended existence in Time and Place.”** Davis's mention here of “more general shapes” as well as “extended existence in Time and Place”—along with his talk in his 1940 text on Hot Still-Scape for Six2 REINTRODUCTION Colors of “a new unity” which “is a new part of Nature”—all point to the centrality of ideas about the space-time continuum for Davis and, specifically, its interpretation as a “block universe.” As discussed in Appendix A, Minkowski had formulated the four-dimensional space-time continuum in 1908 in order to unify the multiple frames of reference of individual observers after Einstein had made them relative in 1905, and he actually referred to his structure as an “absolute” world.” In the block universe interpretation, summarized by Jeans in The Mysterious Universe, the space-time continuum is understood as a four-dimensional geometric structure in which future events are already extant (and past events preserved), and an individual simply progresses through three-dimensional cross sections of the structure as time progresses.'® Similarly, Davis, eager to create a rationalized vision of nature, had written in 1933 of his recent paintings: This series of pictures . . . presents simultaneously that which is observed sequentially. It rationalizes vision and creates a new view of nature which is not entirely the accident of binocular vision. In contrast to ordinary methods which present on a canvas observations made in time and are therefore to a degree unrelated, this system brings into one focus and one place, the past, present, and future events involved in the act of observation of any given subject.'"! In a 1952 statement to Museum of Modern Art Director Alfted Barr, Davis associated such an “absolute, universal art” with what he termed “The Amazing Continuity.” He explained to Barr that “amazing” was “appropriate to the kind of painting I wanted to look at” and that “continuity” referred to “the experience of seeing the same thing in many paintings of completely different subject matter and style.”" Although the artist told Barr in 1952 that his phrase had “no further significance than thar,” he had also hinted at additional content in his comments to Bart. Clarifying his goal of an art beyond the specific “time, place and personal situation of the artist,” Davis had concluded, “Never a standardized art or a pure areas a substitute for absolute art, but an art in which the amazing continuity of the obligatory dimension of free decision given in each percent-quantum is the exclusive authority and valid reason for its shape.”REINTRODUCTION 33 Davis had, in fact, written a much fuller definition of the “Amazing Continuity” in his daybook for October 28, 1951, which makes clear that science continued to underpin his art: Reality is characterized by, and in Art has the shape of, the Amazing Continuity which is the Constant Percept of a Five Dimensional figure . . . 3 dimensions of space 1 dimension of time 1 dimension of indetermination Only this 5 dimensional shape is Art because its content corresponds to the Totality of common perceptual experience. Art drawing is the completion of consciousness in Objective Action on 3 dimensional Color-Space Logic in the Likeness of the Total Constant Percept. ... The Total Percept is a consciousness. . .« Itis self evident complete Satisfaction." Here Davis went beyond his hero Einstein to create a five-dimensional art- science theory that fused Relativity’s space-time continuum as the model for his universal “Total Constant Percept” with a “dimension of indetermination.” Davis's idea accomplishes playfully what no physicist had been able to do successfully: to unify Einstein's theories with the quantum physics of Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, whose “principle of indeterminacy” or “principle of uncertainty” he would have encountered in Jeans’s book. Yet in a development now made especially resonant by the centrality of the early five-dimensional theories of Theodor Kaluza for physics in the 1970s-1980s, Davis appears to have picked up on specialized coverage of Einstein’s interest in Kaluza and, subsequently, similar interest in a fifth dimension in quantum physics. “Fifth Dimension Is New Realm Entered by Professor Einstein,” declared a Science News Letter article in March 1939, noting a paper by Einstein and his student Peter Bergmann secking to unify gravitation and clectromagnetism.'5 Nine years later, in August 1948, Science News Letter featured the headline “Fifth Dimension Invented,” this time reporting on a paper by British mathematician H. T. Flint, which suggested that a fifth “uncertainty dimension” could help to explain quantum effects." This was not information touted in the popular press; rather, it took an artist like Davis, with a deep interest in science, to be aware of it. Davis was“ REINTRODUCTION thus both wholly of his time, responding more fully than any other artist to Relativity Theory, and ahead of his time, finding theoretical inspiration in the renewed scientific interest in higher spatial dimensions that would reach the general public and other artists only in the 1980s. With its forms transcending the specifics of observation at any given moment, a work such as Hor Still-Scape for Six Colors accomplished Davis's goal for painting, which he wrote as “The Amazing Contin-uity,” as he painted the phrase on his 1951 painting Visa (The Museum of Modern Art, New York). Rather than the etherial continuity of Cubist or Futurist painting or Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, continuity for Davis signified a new matrix of experience grounded in the space-time continuum plus, by 1951, the freedom of indetermination: “the Constant Percept of a Five Dimensional figure.” As he had written in his 1945 “Autobiography,” noted above, “Through science the whole concept of what reality is has been changed.”!” He might well have added “what painting is” as well. In contrast to the writing on art and science in the 1940s and 1950s that sought to connect Picasso and Einstein or Cubism and Relativity, it was Davis—not Picasso—whose art theory and style owed a debt to Einstein's theories. Davis believed his art was an accurate response to the “spirit of modern society, which in its progressive aspects is materialistic and scientific.”!* Einstein and the space-time continuum of Relativity Theory, interpreted as a block universe, thus served as an effective vehicle for Davis to fashion himself as a logical, scientific painter in the art world of New York, where, by the later 1940s, the far more subjective style that would come to be known as Abstract Expressionism was emerging. Rooted in sources such as Surrealist automatism, Jungian psychology, and various “primitive” arts, the Abstract Expressionists, including Barnett Newman in particular, sought to distance themselves from earlier European modernism as well as its links to the spatial fourth dimension.'® In 1951 Willem de Kooning, a close friend of Davis, summed up his own reaction to all of the talk of a fourth dimension, space, and space-time: “That space of science—that space of the physicists—I am truly bored with by now. ... If I stretch my arms next to the rest of myself and wonder where my fingers are—that is all the space I need as a painter.”""°REINTRODUCTION 35 The Fourth Dimension 1950-2000: An Overview “Keepers of the Flame” of the Fourth Dimension: Laszié Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Duchamp, and Buckminster Fuller As published in 1983, this book concluded with a shore comment on Lészlé Moholy-Nagy, along with Siegfried Giedion, as key popularizers of the world of “space-time” in the 1940s. In contrast to Stuart Davis's quiet engagement with Relativity Theory, Moholy argued vocally in his publications for the importance of a dynamic new approach to art in the wake of Einstein.'"' Ac the German Bauhaus in the 1920s Moholy had begun to incorporate motion in works such as his Light Prop for an Electric Stage (1922-30) (fig. R.12), and kinetic sculpture would become the primary artistic response to Relativity Theory.’ Following World Fig. RAZ Lészl6 Moholy-Nagy, Light Prop for an Electric Stage [Light-Space Modula 1922-30, kinetic sculpture of steel, plastic, wood, and other materials, electric motor. Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, gift of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. (Photo: Busch-Reisinger Museum). © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild- Kunst, Bonn.36 REINTRODUCTION War Il, “space-time” became a watchword for modernity in the late 1940s and 1950s, popularized in the American art world by a spate of articles stimulated by Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture (1941) and both Moholy’s The New Vision (American editions, 1932, 1938, 1946) and his monumental Vision in Motion of 1947." Although Moholy died of leukemia at age fifty-one in November 1946, Vision in Motion would become the single most influential source on space-time and modern art, reaching its eighth printing in 1969." Vision in Motion, with its groundbreaking design layout integrating images and text, set forth Moholy’s view of twentieth-century art, along with examples of his ‘own work and that of his students. As he had observed in a 1946 article presenting his forthcoming’s book’s central theme, ‘Among the new forces shaping our life the problems of space-time are of primary importance. . . . By introducing consciously the elements time and speed into our life, we add to the static space existence a new kinetic dimension. . . . The space-time experience is a biological function, as important as the experience of color, shape, and tone. It is also a new medium of the arts.""> Both in that article and in Vision in Motion, Moholy made certain to clarify that “space-time problems in the arts are not necessarily based on Einstein’s theory of relativity.” Rather, he explained, “Einstein’s terminology of ‘space-time’ and ‘relativity’ has been absorbed by our daily language. Whether we use the terms ‘space-time’, ‘motion and speed’, or ‘vision in motion’, rightly or wrongly, they designate a new and kinetic existence freed from the static, fixed framework of the past.”""6 Envisioning the artist as a catalyst for new integrative approaches in society, Moholy extended his definition of “vision in motion” to include such applications as “seeing, thinking, feeling in relationship.”'”” Unlike The New Vision, originally published at the Bauhaus as Von Maserial zu Architektur in 1929, which had contained some remnants of the spatial fourth dimension, the new dimension in Vision in Motion is defined almost completely as time.""’ In conjunction with his comments on Einstein, Moholy summarized the Special Theory of Relativity in an intelligent, one-paragraph footnote, which also contains one of the book’s few overt references to the fourth dimension by name: “Time isa coordinate of space. Its the ‘fourth dimension’—a physical measurement.””? Nonetheless, Moholy did not suggest any sort of direct connection between RelativityREINTRODUCTION ” Theory and Cubism, as other authors in the 1940s, such as Paul Laporte, would do. Rather, he simply wrote of the style in terms of space-time: “Like Einstein in physics, Freud in psychoanalysis, the cubist painters had a tremendous impact. . . . Cubism is ‘vision in motion,’ a new essay at two-dimensional rendering of rotated objects.”!”° However, for Cubism to conform to his “vision in motion” theme, Moholy had to argue that it involved “the presentation of the object or person in motion from every viewpoint as if revolved and rotated before the spectator,” producing an overly kinetic reading of the style, While he had to force the case somewhat for Cubism to fit the “vision in motion” paradigm, Moholy embraced works such as Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (fig, 3.3) and paintings by the Futurists, which actually exhibited evidence of motion, albeit long before popular awareness of Einstein and space-time.'?! Although not illustrated by Moholy-Nagy, Duchamp had, in fact, made a number of spinning, optically oriented works during the 1920s and 1930s (see, c.g figs. 3.16, 3.17), including his printed Rotorelief disks of 1935.) In the context of the flowering of kinetic art in the United States and Europe in the 1950s, these objects were often discussed or exhibited with works by Moholy, Alexander Calder, and others as responses to the world of space-time (fig, R.13)." Yet, in all of Duchamp’s kinetic works, including his 1926 film Anemic Cinema, with its rotating disks alternating with spiraling puns, his intention had been to explore spatial effects through motion. As discussed in chapter 3 and further below, that was true whether by means of the “elemental parallelism” of the Nude Descending or the pulsing of his rotating spirals and excentric circles." By contrast, Moholy’s primary subject was temporal motion: he had originally created the Light Prop as a tool to produce moving patterns of reflected light, which he recorded in his film Black White Grey of 1930. Although Moholy had not envisioned the Light Prop as a sculpture itself, the work would become an icon of kinetic art and space-time, even acquiring after his death the title Light-Space Modulator." Despite his primary identification with the world of space-time, Moholy through his publications also functioned indirectly as a “keeper of the flame” of the early twentieth-century’s engagement with the spatial fourth dimension. His references to spatial dimensions in The New Vision and usage of the term in Vision in Motion, even if in the new context of Relativity Theory, served as a thread of continuity for his readers. Looking across the divide between the two halves of the century, however, the primary standard bearer for the spatial fourth dimension was,38 REINTRODUCTION Fig. RAB Le Mouvement exhibition, Galerie Denise René, Paris, April 1955. From Le Mouvement / The Movement Paris 1955 (New York: Editions Denise René, 1975), p. 9. © Galerie Denise René, Paris. of course, Duchamp. As the carly twentieth-century artist who explored four- dimensional geometry and space more fully than any other, Duchamp provided a vital new source for artists (and for scholars of his work) when he published his sequestered Large Glass notes on the subject in his 1966 A linfinitif or White Box. To the names of Duchamp and Moholy, we may add a third “keeper of the flame,” Buckminster Fuller, born the same year as Moholy, 1895, but who lived until 1983 and was a major cultural presence in the 1960s and 1970s, Although early in his career Fuller evoked the temporal fourth dimension of Einstein (c.g., his 1928 4D Time Lock, fig. 4.22), he ultimately emerged in the early 1960s as a major advocateREINTRODUCTION 9 of the spatial fourth dimension. Of these three figures, Duchamp and Fuller would prove particularly important for artists in the 1960s and beyond." When Duchamp signed the Manifeste Dimensioniste in Paris in 1936, along with a variety of other artists (see the conclusion to the 1983 book), he had added a clarifying note in the “Mosaic” of artists’ statements at the end: “Use of movement in the plane for the creation of forms in space: Rotoreliefs.”!”” As noted at the beginning of this Reintroduction (as well as in chapter 1), time or motion as a means to generate higher dimensional forms—or to reduce them by sectioning— had a longstanding history in literature on the spatial fourth dimension (fig. R.1, fig. 4.10). In addition, spirals had been linked to higher spatial dimensions in several ways in the early twentieth century, beyond their basic action of moving out of a plane into the third dimension. Hinton had used a spiral passing through a plane to illustrate the way a higher dimensional, spatial phenomenon would be mistaken as an experience of time or motion by denizens of a plane world (fig. 2.25). Even more important, the asymmetry of right-handed and left-handed spiral growth in nature had regularly been pointed to as possible evidence for the existence of a fourth dimension of space. As discussed in chapter I (and noted briefly earlier), that theme was part of a larger discourse involving mirror images, including right and left hands—on which both Kant and Mébius had speculated—as well as crystals and spirals. According to Bragdon, for example, writing of the mirror symmetrical tartaric acid crystals in figure R.2, “If 1 changed into 2 without chemical reconstitution it would indicate a fourth dimension.” Spirals, symmetry, and mirrors were all themes in Duchamp’s notes for the Large Glass on the subject of the fourth dimension and the Bride’s realm.™* In addition to noting the presence of spirals in the Glass, chapter 3 tracks the evolution of Duchamp’s thinking about the fourth dimension from ideas rooted in Gleizes’s and Metzinger’s interest in Poincaré’s discussions of tactile and motor space, through his sometimes playful speculations on four-dimensional geometry, to his extensive ruminations on mirrors (and symmetry) and comments on virtuality (see, eg., fig. R.14)." In the end, he returned to the theme of shadows (another highly resonant motif for the artist) and a much simpler solution for the Bride’s dimensional status: she was meant to be the two-dimensional, photographic-like imprint of a three- dimensional Bride, who was herself the shadow of the four-dimensional Bride." Fortunately, because of Duchamp’s commitment to his notes as an essential