Buckminster Fuller and Russian esotericist Peter Ouspensky situating them at an intersection of science, mathematics and culture excited by the inspirations of spacetime. With the occult and philosophical thread, Henderson links such diverse innovators as Marcel Duchamp, R.

Buckminster Fuller named Bragdon as an important author, and Martin Gardner referenced Bragdon in his own popular expositions on the fourth dimension. Fused with Bragdon’s background in Theosophy and spiritualism, his thoughts went on to be the basis of four books and other writings. Among those excited by his books on higher dimensions was Claude Bragdon. Henderson, a scholar of the occult in the history of Twentieth Century art, cites as a major figure “hyperspace philosopher” Charles Hinton. Buckminster Fuller, Robert Smithson, and the Park Place Gallery group in the ‘60s and more recently for such icons as Tony Robbin and digital architect Marcos Novak.įrench author Francis Warrain is quoted on the fourth dimension: “What horizons are opened to scholars, occultists, to poets!” A fascinating part of this history is the intertwined development of occult philosophies along artistic movements. It was these higher dimensions that instigated new conceptions of space for R. Ultimately, Henderson finds, a fourth dimension in its many manifestations eclipsed alternative (non-Euclidean) geometries in the popular mind. The art of Duchamp covers this entire span and Henderson charts the artist’s changing commitment to new geometries. The temporal focus coincided with the popularity of the theory of Relativity from the ‘30s to ‘70s, but a spatial understanding was dominant during the bookends of the Twentieth Century. The arc of popular interpretations of a fourth dimension is covered, including temporal and spatial interpretations. This work is strongly persuasive that the reception of fourth dimension theories and related topics was fundamental to the development of modern art. The work is well illustrated, though it would have been nice if at least some of the numerous black and white plates had been upgraded to color. Looking back on the three decades since the original publication, Henderson considers the further impact of these concepts on art and culture in the late Twentieth Century. Along with a new index, there is an extensive hundred-page “Reintroduction” that serves as the author’s reappraisal, history, and synopsis of this impressive work. Henderson covers the gamut from philosophy to painting, literature to the plastic arts, and beyond. Henderson demonstrates the importance of this new conception of space for figures ranging from Buckminster Fuller, Robert Smithson, and the Park Place Gallery group in the 1960s to Tony Robbin and digital architect Marcos Novak.This revised edition of a work first published in 1983 details the impact and spread of non-Euclidean geometry and the idea of a fourth dimension into art and thought in the early Twentieth Century. In a remarkable turn of events, it has returned as an important theme in contemporary culture in the wake of the emergence in the 1980s of both string theory in physics (with its ten- or eleven-dimensional universes) and computer graphics.

Although largely eclipsed by relativity theory beginning in the 1920s, the spatial fourth dimension experienced a resurgence during the later 1950s and 1960s. In an extensive new Reintroduction, Henderson surveys the impact of interest in higher dimensions of space in art and culture from the 1950s to 2000.

That iconoclastic idea encouraged radical innovation by a variety of early twentieth-century artists, ranging from French Cubists, Italian Futurists, and Marcel Duchamp, to Max Weber, Kazimir Malevich, and the artists of De Stijl and Surrealism. The possibility of a spatial fourth dimension suggested that our world might be merely a shadow or section of a higher dimensional existence. Summary: In this groundbreaking study, first published in 1983 and unavailable for over a decade, Linda Dalrymple Henderson demonstrates that two concepts of space beyond immediate perception - the curved spaces of non-Euclidean geometry and, most important, a higher, fourth dimension of space - were central to the development of modern art.

Non euclidean geometry art